


burnt toffee

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alice's Doc Martens, All the parents are bisexual but we won't get into that, Bisexual Fred Andrews, Childhood Friends, Chubby Hal, Coming of Age, Crushes, First Dates, First Kiss, First Love, Growing Apart, Hal and Alice fall in love in an ice cream shop if you can believe it, Halice - Freeform, Hiram doesn't live in Riverdale yet, Ice Cream, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Multi, Secrets, Self-Discovery, Summer Jobs, Summer Vacation, Who's an idiot, Young Hal, bisexual FP Jones, parentdale, young fred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-06-20 17:57:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15539808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: It’s the summer before sophomore year, and Hal Cooper just wants to keep his head down, work his job at the ice cream shop, and ignore the feeling that he’s somehow growing up miles behind the rest of his peers. His best friend Fred Andrews has suddenly become an expert with girls, while Hal still hasn’t had his first kiss. And Fred’s got a new best friend named FP, which means Hal's been pushed down to second place.But summer has other plans for him. And when Fred’s old friend Alice Smith – an acid-tongued daredevil from the wrong side of the tracks – shows up for work during his shift, he knows nothing about his life is ever going to be the same.





	1. Zelda

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bewareoftrips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bewareoftrips/gifts).



> FOR KIM ❤️❤️❤️
> 
> Kim, I hope this keeps you alive! This is a multi-chapter that I'll be updating throughout August. Hal is a good character who loves his wife everyone else is just mean.

**June 30th.**

They’re walking home from a concert, and Fred has a new girl on his arm.

Her name’s Hilda, Hil for short (Hal had thought at first she was saying Jill) and she’s the kind of intimidatingly pretty person that always floats as if by accident into Fred’s sphere: a bombshell-figured redhead with a jewel-blue tube top sneaking up above her studded navel. Hilda’s scary tall, but Fred doesn’t seem to mind, tipping his chin up to look at her in a way that manages to be endearing instead of awkward. Despite the height difference they look perfectly matched when Hal hangs back from them, enough that he feels unnervingly that if someone were to shove him from behind and trample him in the post-concert rush, they’d just drift away together and wouldn’t notice him missing until somewhere around their second wedding anniversary. 

Hilda had first materialized at Fred’s elbow halfway through the opening act, on what Hal had assumed was a quest for the nearby row of port-a-potties that stood at attention a little way to the right of the stage. Instead, though, she and the friend whose hand was locked tightly in hers had taken up residence in the area to Fred’s left for the rest of the night.

Even with the foam earplugs his mother had insisted he wear, Hal could hardly hear himself think, but Fred and Hilda were carrying on what any observer would have to assume to be the funniest conversation in the world. In fact, despite Fred insisting earlier that evening that he’d rather die than miss this performance, his friend hadn’t glanced once at the stage since the redhead had shown up. Every so often he would dip his head to whisper in her ear, the gesture as intimate as if they were alone together. By the time the performance was halfway finished he was holding her by the hips, one thumb hooked oh-so-casually through the back belt loop of her denim skirt, and both of them were laughing uproariously about something she’d whispered that Hal had no idea how Fred had possibly heard.

Frozen in discomfort, Hal had been left to stare blankly ahead of him at the stage, his aching feet sinking deeper and deeper into the muddy field where Greendale hosted their blues festival, feeling as heavy and as oppressively large in their world as a weather balloon tethered to the ground.

He’d hoped in vain that Fred and Hilda would switch numbers and part ways after the set ended, but instead the sweeping crowd had somehow merged their groups, leaving Hal and the friend - a short, chubby girl with a shock of green hair - to trail just behind Fred and Hilda, whose low-rise jean skirt had sunk down under the pressure of Fred’s thumb to expose a perfect constellation of freckles across the skin of her lower back.

Hal keeps his eyes conscientiously above this point, doing his best to keep from getting shoved in all directions by the crowd going the opposite way. As often happens when Fred’s engrossed in the opposite sex, his friend has completely forgotten that Hal is there. Hal and the green-haired girl - Zelda, no short form offered - are at least several feet behind as they stumble through bodies down the sticky concrete of Greendale’s main street. Fred and Hilda, despite having only eyes for each other, never trip. 

This leaves Hal to the laborious and excruciating task of trying to conjure up something to say to Zelda as they walk, wishing with all his heart that he was at home, in bed, and that he’d never heard of Fred Andrews in his life. Zelda’s fat, but she holds herself like a skinny person, which Hal finds intimidating to no end. She glares at the people around them who give them dirty looks for the indiscretion of being larger than average in a space that demands slimness. Hal can feel himself drawing away from her as if the glares had been meant for him.

He’s lucky that Zelda talks, a little, as they move away from the street and off toward a low, sloping hill that leads to a dirt road. She and Hilda are sisters, not just friends, Hal learns, which makes the glaring difference in their appearances all the more surprising. She’s wearing a short black dress with a bit of lace poking out at the collar, though the lace fails to adequately cover a terrifying amount of cleavage. She has a colourful tattoo over her left breast and keeps looking at Hal expectantly, as though waiting for him to say something. Hal keeps his mouth firmly shut.

Even though he wants to remind Fred that they’re going the _opposite_ direction from the bus stop that will take them back to Riverdale.

The reason for their pilgrimage - through unlit fields, now, in the middle of the night, Hal would point out if he had the guts to open his mouth - is that Hilda and Zelda allegedly know an amazing place to go look at the stars. The fact that Hal had sworn up and down to his mother that he’d catch a bus the moment the concert ended had fallen by the wayside, and Hal yet to think of a reasonable way to interrupt Fred’s fun to remind him. The thought had entered his head that he could take a bus home alone, but he’s not quite at that point yet – successfully completing the transfer between Greendale and Riverdale alone was somehow more frightening even than the pitch-black cornfield they’re wading through.

The air is cooler here, a relief outside the sticky beer-can dotted minefield of the outdoor venue, but it also smells awfully like cow pies and Hal jumps a mile every time a stray leaf of corn brushes against his shin. It’s so dark that he’s lost track of Fred and Hilda ahead of them - their slender bodies have been sucked up into the shadow, as if the darkness had suddenly become viscous and swallowed them whole. Zelda slows, and Hal wonders if she’s lost them too.

“Where-?” he manages, breaking his vow of silence at last, but cuts himself off when he sees the silhouette of two people up against a structure that looks like a barn, performing an unmistakable routine of what Hal’s older sister Gertrude calls _tonsil hockey._ In the silvery-invisibility of night he hears Hilda’s laugh floating back to them when her face pulls back from Fred’s, as perfect in silhouette as a couple in a movie, save for the irregular height difference. Hal looks quickly away.

There’s a rustle of something that sounds like the corn, and when he gets up the nerve to look again the two are balanced precariously on a stack of hay bales, Hilda on her back with her legs hanging down and Fred above her in his jeans and loose t-shirt, both of them giggling and laughing like whatever comedy routine had been so funny at the concert had carried over. Hal’s stomach feels tight, a half-assed asthma attack even though he hasn’t been running.

“Mind if I smoke?” Zelda asks, casually, as though her sister does this all the time. She probably does. Hal thinks he and Zelda have more in common than he’d originally believed. He shoves all of his mother’s warnings about secondhand smoke and lung cancer out of his mind and manages a _no, go ahead,_ even though he hates the smell more than anything.

So Hal stands in a field while Zelda puffs on her cigarette, offering him a draw only once, which he vehemently declines. It’s a dark, moonless evening, and the glowing ember from the tip burns like a red star. From the direction of the hay bales he can hear the briefest snatches of laughter, ghostly on the midnight breeze, and the tell-tale rustling that tells him catching the 12:45 bus is probably out of the question. He cranes his neck back only so he won’t have to watch them, and finds himself facing a dizzying myriad of stars, spilling wildly across the canvas of the sky like something you’d see at the science museum.

Hal wonders if this is adulthood.

He feels the tethered-blimp feeling again, and something more: an oppressive, swelling fear that’s been quietly building in him since the beginning of last year, when he walked into Riverdale High as a student. Something like being the only person in the world who stuck out, who was wrong. Like he was sitting in Spanish class, but all his notes were in French.

Hal looks at Zelda’s hand - chubby, like his, each finger decorated with an amazing array of delicate rings - and thinks to himself that he could take it. It was about time he held hands with a girl, even if he couldn’t bring himself to speak to her or perform whatever was making Fred laugh so hard and so lovingly over by the hay bales. It would be his first time holding a girl’s hand, but there was no mystery to it the way there was with kissing. He could lace their fingers. The stars feel like they’re egging him on.

He wipes his hand on his pants so it’s clean, stares intently at Zelda’s rings for a moment, and then shoves his hand in his pocket instead.

Zelda finishes her cigarette. 

They don’t make it out of there until 1:30. Hilda and Zelda leave them at the cornfield, and Fred floats back toward the concert venue as if in a dream, Hal keeping close at his side without penetrating the glowing bubble that seems to drift around Fred as he walks, like he’s shielded by the protective power of his own maturity and joy. He has Hilda’s phone number scribbled in blue ink on his arm.

“She was far out, man,” Fred says on the bus ride home, both of them standing, face overtaken by the dreamy expression that only Fred gets when he’s just met another girl to fixate on. “Really far out. Wow.”

Hal squeezes the yellow pole until his hand hurts.


	2. Fred

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something about freshman year had turned everything on its head, until heavy, husky, big, were words that stung like poison, even spoken in his mother’s gentle voice or subtly lettered on the tasteful signs that hung over the boy’s section in the mall.

**July.**

Hal was born in December of 1975, meaning Fred Andrews is a half-year older than him and that he has classmates who stretch that difference to nearly a full twelve months. He blames this discrepancy sometimes for what seems like an unfortunate mistake of his development, the fact that at age almost-fifteen he’s never had anyone of the opposite sex look at him as anything other than a friend.     

Back in the first grade, his parents had considered skipping him up a year in spite of the late birthday, because Hal’s scores were high enough to put him with the second graders. Ultimately his mother had decided that rushing his social development would put a bigger strain on him, a decision that has probably saved Hal’s life a hundred times over by now. If starting Sophomore year without ever having held the hand of a girl who’s not his mother was bad, imagine starting your Junior year that way. 

Part of it is that he’s only ever had unrequited crushes, like Marcie Blaine from summer camp. Or his Sunday school teacher, Miss Kelly. Or even Sierra Sherwood, briefly, when he’d got to walk the attendance down to the office with her in the second grade. But Hal had never been tough enough to ask if someone he liked felt the same way about him. 

Fred says this is his problem exactly – that he doesn’t tell the girls he likes that he likes them. And maybe in Fred’s world that’s a possibility, maybe if you’re Fred Andrews you tell a girl you have a crush on her and you get to roll around in some hay bales with her that same night. But being Hal Cooper doesn’t work like that. When you have braces and thighs too big for the desk chairs, you take what you can get. 

If he thinks back, he can remember the first moment he and Fred had become friends. There was a group of them that liked to play baseball in the sandlot on Sundays, and Fred had torn his church pants sliding into home. Hal – already well-practiced at simple mending thanks to his mother’s weekly lessons - had stitched them up for him with a needle and thread to keep him from getting in trouble. Fred had looked at him like the sun shone out of his ass, and they’d been close ever since.

Hal had always considered them best friends, though it was a friendship of convenience more than bonafide connection – a carry-over from shared carpools to Sunday School and Eagle Scouts and the proximity of their parents' houses. They’d been permanent fixtures at one another’s birthday parties before they were old enough to have a say in the matter, and had shared a homeroom every year from first grade to the last year of middle school.

Then last year had been their first at Riverdale High, and FP Jones had been thrown into the mix. Fred and FP went together like peanut butter and jelly, and Hal and FP something more like oil and water. So they’d drifted. It was the first time Hal had realized that Fred’s friendship, the one constant in his life since kindergarten, was beginning to be lost to him.

The second time was in the cornfield.  

 _Here’s your problem_ , Mary had said to him once, smack in the middle of last year. Mary liked Hal but loathed Fred, so they only sat together when Fred was at basketball, or off with FP. _You’ve never even been rejected. You need to get your heart broken. If it happens you won’t be scared anymore._

 _Look at Fred_ , she had said, lip curling in disdain the way it always did when she had to talk about him. She didn’t have to say more. Stacked up, Fred had had more heartbreaks in his fifteen years than some adults had in their whole lives. That’s why it came so easy to him, why he let love roll over and off him in waves without drowning in it.

Hal had tried to explain to Mary that he didn’t _want_ his heart broken. Who in their right mind would want their heart to be broken? And who, especially, would expose themselves to heartbreak as clinically as a parent bringing their child to play with a friend who had chicken pox. No, not Hal. Hal was perfectly content to have fat thighs and no girlfriend.

And yet there’s this ache in him – to love and be loved, to be understood by someone, to be unconditionally special to another human being in the world. A balm for the kind of loneliness irrevocably tied up in the memory of standing off to the side at school dances, waiting for something that didn’t come. The eventual superseding of truth over fantasy: that it was not coming, was never coming, and that he should give up.

The trajectory of Hal’s life so far can be mapped in a series of things he’s given up on. When they hit high school he’d just stopped attending dances altogether, no matter Fred’s wheedling – _c’mon Hal, it’ll be fun_ – or his mother’s gentle cajoling – _you look handsome, sweetheart, and it’s what’s on the inside that counts anyway._

He blames it on his mother, sometimes. The trips to Pop’s for chocolate milkshakes whenever he brought home a good report card. Seconds and thirds of blueberry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream after Sunday dinners. Chocolate cupcakes with frosting on birthdays. Stacks of pancakes with every breakfast. Snickerdoodle cookies and cereal treats as an after-school snack.

So maybe a summer job at an ice cream shop is the last thing he needs.

It’s started haunting him lately: the thought of how he’d look stuffed into one of the cutesy white uniforms they’ll have him wear until the end of August. He’s tormented by the possibility of the apron strings barely coming together around his middle, the way the starched white fabric might be laughable against his body. It’s enough to make him dread the beginning of his summer job, though he’d initially been proud and excited at the thought of it.

A year ago that would have been the last thing from his mind. A year ago he barely spared a thought to what he looked like clothed, would have looked forward unreservedly to a summer of sneaking samples and breathing in the aroma of baking waffle cones. Something about freshman year had turned everything on its head, until _heavy_ , _husky_ , _big_ , were words that stung like poison, even spoken in his mother’s gentle voice or subtly lettered on the tasteful signs that hung over the boy’s section in the mall. 

In Fred’s world, these signs don’t exist. Fred’s an athletic kid with stringbean legs and a flat plane of stomach under his brother’s hand-me-downs. Hal envies Fred’s world all the time: bright and simple and easy to live in. Fred could have braces and be chubby and awkward and would probably still turn out all right. It’s something about the _Fred_ ness of him – the ease and the pleasure with which he moves through life, the self-assuredness that Hal’s never quite learned how to fake. He envies it in some dark, hungry part of his soul that he hasn’t yet learned to tame. Wishes he’d kissed and been kissed so often that it was no longer special.

Hal doesn’t know what it is about him that makes it different. Only that he and Fred, once inseparable, have become separated from each other since high school started as neatly as if they were divided by a pane of glass.

Every time Hal had called Fred’s house that weekend, Fred’s mother had told him he was out with FP. It was late Sunday night by the time Fred had returned the calls.   

 _Hi,_ Fred had said abruptly into Hal’s ear, the after-glow of laughter evident in his voice, and Hal had wondered with an awkward pang if FP was in the room. Or worse, if Fred was sitting there toe-to-toe with Hilda Spellman. _Sorry I didn’t call back. Do you want to hang out tomorrow, on Monday?_   

Hal feels it again. That he’s a balloon tied to Fred’s wrist. That Fred could unburden himself of Hal at any moment, that the thing binding them together is as flimsy as carnival ribbon. Fred could snap the string and set him adrift, without warning, into the sky.

 _I can’t,_ Hal had said regretfully. _I have to work._  


	3. Dream Cream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scooping the rainbow of handmade ice creams in the display case, inhaling the comforting aroma of sugar and waffles, Hal feels a reassurance settle foreign and pleasurable into his bones every time he clocks in.

Right from the start, Hal knows the ice cream shop is going to be his refuge.

He learns the job quickly, and the first week of July passes in a comfortably forgettable blur. Scooping the rainbow of handmade ice creams in the display case, inhaling the comforting aroma of sugar and waffles, Hal feels a reassurance settle foreign and pleasurable into his bones every time he clocks in. He turns down the owners’ generous offer of more days off, relishing in the encouraging repetitiveness of the work, the simple pleasure of the way the lights gently brighten the colours of the ice cream behind the glass. He feels safe here, protected from the necessary summer rituals of his rapidly encroaching adolescence.

He volunteers to work the busy shift on the fourth of July, thereby liberating himself from having to follow along while Fred and FP set off firecrackers and from witnessing the massive blow-up between his mother and Gertrude about whether or not she and her friends had been drinking. The shop is packed with customers all day, but the hurried rhythm of the work makes the time pass quickly. The owners, his old piano teacher and her husband, give him happy smiles when he leaves in the evening with time-and-a-half in his pocket for his trouble. Hal feels at last something like confidence brimming under his skin.

Noelle, the woman who had once coached him patiently through his scales, is what Hal supposed you’d call _big_ , though not so much as himself. She wears her weight more like a model, her curves in all the right places. Her husband Nick is full of muscle, his bulging, tattooed arms balanced out by a disarmingly genuine smile and a receding hairline. With their own children grown and married, the couple dotes on the students of the town, and Hal feels pleasurably relaxed under the protective shield of their kindness, much more laid back than the parental energy he gets at home.

He had worried for nothing: the apron strings of his uniform reach all the way around his middle and tie up easily in the back. He hears his father’s voice in his ear as he double-knots it every morning. Knots were the only comparatively masculine venture that Hal had excelled in when he and Fred were in eagle scouts. Strong but neat. 

Tucked peacefully on the corner of Main Street, the pink-and-teal awning of _Dream Cream_ conceals a near-perfect replica of a 1950’s soda shop, complete with black-and-white tiled walls and pink vinyl stools. A domed glass case protects the kaleidoscope of sugary offerings – burnt toffee and banana pudding are the newest ice cream flavours, though the old mainstays - bubblegum, cookie dough, fudge ripple – never change. 

Rocky road is Hal’s favourite: chocolate, marshmallows, almonds. It has been since he was a child. He can’t help but smile at the hand-lettered sign as he scrubs the glass to a shine on Thursday morning, reassured by the tasks waiting at hand for him to complete: ice cream cones to dip and roll in sprinkles, metal scoops to heat up in warm water. A sugary love ballad plays over the speakers, one of the rockabilly CD’s that Nick keeps stacked on the shelf beneath the cash.

“You’re going to have a friend around here pretty soon,” Noelle says. She’s unpacking ice cream spoons behind the counter, setting them upright in the jar. “Nick and I have another student coming in to help with the summer rush.”

“Oh,” says Hal, his heart sinking a little. He’d gotten used to the rhythm of his first week. Another person his own age would penetrate the candy-coloured snow globe of the shop, would let his insecurities back in like exposing film. Hal had always got on better with adults. He forces what he hopes is an enthusiastic smile. “Okay.”

“I’m sure you’ll get along great,” says Noelle, smiling brightly, and pats Hal affectionately on the shoulder as she squeezes behind him to head to the back room. “You won’t mind helping me show someone new around, will you?”  

“No,” says Hal, dreading it already. “I won’t mind.”

* * *

Friday brings a wave of sticky, oppressive heat, just in time for the weekend. Fred had shown up without invitation on Hal’s doorstep at 7:20 AM, clad in only his swim trunks and untied shoes, a towel tossed over one shoulder. For reasons unknown to Hal, his mother had let him in.

“POOL, COOPER!” he yells heartily as Hal dashes down the stairs for breakfast, causing Hal to skid on the hardwood in surprise and almost wipe out on his ass.

“I don’t have a swimsuit,” Hal answers, gripping the railing to get his footing back. He’d never bought a new one after outgrowing last years, and had been hoping to get through the summer without having to go to the pool. “And I’m on my way to work.” 

Fred only hears the first part. “You can borrow one of mine.” 

“I work,” repeats Hal. He feels a pang of regret, despite how little he wants to be out in the heat, or how glaringly obvious it is that Fred’s swim trunks would never fit him. “I’m really sorry.”

If Hal had had his invitation turned down by a best friend, especially after he’d been confident enough to stand in their kitchen half-naked and wait for them, he probably would have deflated like a collapsed balloon. But Fred only shrugs, still smiling. Figures. Fred had a hundred other people he could ask to go to the pool with him.

“Okay. I’ll call you when your shift ends. Hey, do you get to eat the ice cream?” Fred drops into a chair at the Cooper’s kitchen table and snatches a piece of bacon. “Wait.” His eyes grow big as saucers. “Can you give out _free_ ice cream?”

Hal has a sudden, horrible vision of his nice, quiet refuge being raided by a dripping, swimsuit-clad Fred and FP, followed closely by hordes of Fred’s girlfriends in bikinis and FP’s foul-mouthed, chain-smoking Southside buddies. All wanting free ice cream cones.

“No,” he says firmly. “And I’ll get in big trouble if I do.”

“Bummer,” says Fred, though Hal’s not sure if it’s really gotten through his head. Fred has a hard time with the words NOT ALLOWED, sometimes. Probably because he’s used to wiggling through loopholes. He tries to pay attention as Fred chatters about his fourth of July, the day he’d spent traipsing all around town with FP, how he’d run into Hilda again by complete coincidence when they were trespassing at the fairgrounds. 

“Her sister really likes you, you know,” Fred begins, and Hal quickly checks his bare wrist.

“Fred, I’m really late. I’m sorry to ask you to leave, but-“

“It’s cool.” Fred finishes his bacon and springs up from the table. “Gotta go anyway.”

“Going to the pool?” Hal asks, his stomach fluttering uncomfortably with the anxiety of being left out.

“Yeah. I better get there before all the crazy people.” Fred laughs and squirms back into his shoes. “It’s stupid hot today.”

Then he’s out the door in a flash, the screen banging in his wake, leaving the already-humid summer air drifting aimlessly into the house and Hal behind.

* * *

 The short walk to the _Dream Cream_ leaves him sticky and out-of-breath, but the double blast of A/C and ice cream smell when Hal opens the door pushes the sweltering heat into the farthest corner of his mind. Nick smiles and waves at him from the front cash. 

“TGIF, huh?” he asks as Hal lifts the pink countertop to step behind the case and tie on his apron. Acronyms are Nick’s passion. Noelle says sometimes he acts more like a kid than their kids do. Hal smiles and nods, though in all truthfulness he’d almost forgotten what day it was. 

Nick looks excited for him. “Got any plans for the weekend?”

Hal tries to think of something to say that won’t sound completely pathetic, but draws a blank. He mumbles something about _nothing yet_ and quickly starts opening the cases of ice cream inside the display case. Nick’s already turned the CD player on while he cashes in, and the songs of some jewel-toned girl group bleed prettily out into the cool air.

Fortunately, if Nick thinks he’s a loser, he doesn’t let on. “Just chilling, huh? That sounds great. That’s what summer should be used for. Relaxing.” He grins, a big messy smile that puts Hal at ease. “Me, I’m going up to see Marco and the grandkids on Saturday. We’re going to try out a jet-ski. Noelle’s worried, ‘cause she knows I always forget to wear sunscreen.” He extends one arm to Hal, showing off his tattoo sleeve. “I told her she’s just jealous of my natural lobster colouring.”

Nick’s white, and Noelle is black. When they’d started dating about forty years ago, apparently that had been a big deal. They’d broken up in the sixties over it, and Nick had even married another woman. Marco, Nick’s eldest, was his son from his first marriage. When that had ended in divorce, Nick and Noelle had found each other again and realized they were still in love. Noelle called their years apart the biggest mistake of her life.

“Sounds fun,” says Hal, trying to subtly imply he was jealous of Nick jet-skiing around the lake all weekend instead of incredibly relieved that he didn’t have to do the same. Nick grins and wallops him gently on the shoulder.

“I gotta check the freezer for more Tiger Tail,” he says. “You’ll be okay holding down the fort, won’t you? It might take me awhile. I’m pretty sure it’s way at the back.” 

“Definitely,” replies Hal. He fills two buckets with warm water and leaves the ice cream scoops in them to soak. Nick slips behind him on the way to the freezer, and Hal sucks his stomach in unconsciously as he feels Nick’s body brush past. It’s funny – despite the small quarters, he never feels as big in here as he does in the rest of the world. Maybe because an ice cream shop is the right place to be fat, if there is one.

He loses himself in the routine of the morning: wiping the tables down, checking to make sure the napkin holders are full, turning on the waffle irons. He’s re-arranging the labels in the ice cream case to make room for Tiger Tail, bent awkwardly double over the lip of the counter to reach the ones at the very front, when he hears the bell over the door ring to announce a customer.

Hal straightens up, hurriedly fixing the neck of his apron, and is hit with a wave of discomfort when he realizes he’s going to have to interact with someone he recognizes from school. She’s standing in the doorway with a bag slung over her shoulder, looking appraisingly from one side of the ice cream shop to the other as though unsure if she’s in the right place. Then, as if making up her mind, she approaches the counter in brusque, wide steps. Her heavy black Doc Martens clump noisily on the tile floor. 

“Hi Hal,” she says when she reaches the display case. They know each other – everyone who’d grown up in Riverdale knows each other – but he hasn’t had a conversation with Alice Smith beyond awkward pleasantries in years. She lived on the other side of town from him, and the only class they’d shared last year was second semester’s last-period history. Still, he should have recognized her on sight from childhood if nothing else – Alice had once been the only girl in the sandlot where Fred had torn his church pants. 

Her trademark long hair is still her most noticeable feature, though in those days she’d often shoved it up under her baseball cap to blend more easily with the boys. Sometimes when they took down kids from other neighbourhoods she was fond of shaking her hair out of her cap to prove to them they’d been bested by a girl. Hal, a traitor to his own sex because of his asthma and flat feet, had always admired her privately for it.

Her hair this summer is the same cornflower blonde he remembers, reaching down past her waist in tangled snarls, but she’s traded in the rest of her tomboy getup for a more daring high school wardrobe: a black denim skirt with colourful stitching up the side and a bright red crop top under a studded denim jacket. Hal thinks about asking if she’s hot in the jacket, and then decides it might be rude. Besides, he wants to get this interaction over with as quickly as possible.

“What can I get you?” he asks, putting a big smile on and hoping she won’t pass on to Fred that she’d seen him working here. Despite having separate homerooms last year, as far as he understands, she and Fred are still close friends. It makes him wonder if anything like the hay bales had ever gone on between them. Alice isn’t necessarily Fred’s type – a little more acid than honey, switchblade-curt and sharp because of her Southside upbringing - though he’s rapidly learning that anything with a skirt and legs is capable of leaning into the category of Fred’s type, and almost nothing would surprise him any longer. For some reason, the thought makes something cold and shaky curl up in his stomach.

Alice is just looking at him, her eyes a piercing blue-grey under smoky eyeliner, and Hal bites down on his tongue as if he might accidentally blurt out the question. “I’m here for work,” she says, and Hal feels like he’s been slapped across the face.

They’d hired another student. Right. _Oh._

“Um-“ he begins brilliantly, glancing over his shoulder for Nick, who’s clearly still occupied with the Tiger Tail. He turns back to her with an anxious smile, his heart beating hard and fast with dread. “Cool. I mean – Do you want to come behind here?” Hal gestures awkwardly at the register before quickly snapping out of his trace and lifting the hinged countertop for her. “It just, uh-“ he narrates awkwardly, “It just lifts up like this.”

“I didn’t know you worked here,” she says in a bored tone, generously ignoring his verbal fumbling. His eye is drawn to the smallness of her as she slips easily through the gap, the bony curve of her bare hip above the skirt, and how much tighter the area behind the counter seems to be with two of them. Hal steps back on instinct, making room, forgetting to reply. 

Objectively, Alice is no prettier than the rest of the girls in school – she’s lacking Hilda’s magazine-bombshell looks, and there’s a harshness to her that blurs any encouragingly feminine features into jagged lines. She certainly hasn’t learned to apply makeup – her lipstick is smeared unappealingly off her lower lip and her eyeliner is all wonky. Yet she’s undeniably attractive in a raw, frightening way that Hal doesn’t understand. Something to do with the assertiveness of her posture. He would believe her unquestioningly if she told him she’d applied the lipstick that way on purpose.

Hal is obliquely terrified of her. 

“You can hang your bag up in the back,” he says softly as she shrugs off her jacket, hating himself for recognizing the voice as the one he always uses to volunteer answers in class. “Or you can put it under the cash register. And the first thing you have to do is put on an apron. But Nick will be back soon. I’m sure he can tell you all this.” Hal’s face is hot and he can feel himself blushing. He has no idea why Alice has thrown him so off-kilter, more so than anyone else who could have shown up from their freshman class. He ducks his head so he’s looking at his shoes and waits for Nick to come back and save him.

Alice is slipping into a clean apron. Hal tries to rehearse something to say in his head. _How’s your summer going? It’s really hot today. Don’t you think it’s hot today? Hot today, isn’t it?_

“Let me help,” he finds himself saying instead, because Alice is frowning, fumbling with her arms awkwardly behind her back, trying to wrangle the annoyingly long apron strings into something resembling a knot. She obediently turns her back to him with a grin of thanks, sweeping most of her long curtain of hair out of the way over her shoulder. A few strands of tangled gold remain. 

Taking a deep breath, Hal moves the hair out of the way and ties her apron on.

She turns and looks at him over her shoulder as he’s tying, her painted lips turning up into a brief smile, something playful and challenging in her gaze. For the briefest moment his heart stops, and all he can see or think about is the pattern of moles scattered across the back of her bare shoulder.

“Alice! Great, you made it!” Nick has emerged from the freezer room, carting two huge buckets of ice cream. He sets them down on the counter and beams like a proud parent. “Hal, this is Alice. She’s our new employee. Alice, you go to Riverdale, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” says Alice, her eyes on Hal. Hal looks intently at the front of Nick’s apron, feeling palpably awkward. Apparently, it wasn’t enough that he was a fumbling mess when girls were involved on his own time. Apparently now he had to come to work every day and feel like he had the worst case of heartburn ever whenever he tried to talk to his co-worker.  

“Great job with the labels, Hal,” says Nick, with all the encouraging pep of a camp counselor. He hauls out one of the empty tubs of ice cream from the display and replaces it with the tub from the freezer, his tattooed biceps bulging. “Alice, I promise I’ll show you the ropes up here tomorrow, but right now I need a ton of help unpacking the shipment we got in last night. Do you think you two could handle that? It’ll give you some time to get acquainted.” 

Hal tries to think of a way to tell him that they’re already acquainted, in the unbelievably awkward way of casual peers who have shared a school system for eleven years but never had a meaningful conversation. But Alice doesn’t give him time to think. “Sure,” she says easily. “If Hal shows me what to do.”

“All right!” Nick definitely missed his calling as a camp counselor. “I just need everything unpacked onto the storage units back there, and then I need some pint labels cut out. Once the afternoon rush comes, Hal, Alice can shadow you to learn the ropes. Capisce?”

Alice laughs, speaking again before Hal can reply. “Capisce.”  

Hal’s annoyed. He’s annoyed that he has to spend the rest of the morning in the back room, and he’s annoyed that his quiet, safe place has vanished. Alice is loud, as loud as the clump of her Doc Martens on the tile floor, and the energy is different with her in the shop. Most of all, he’s annoyed that she goes to Riverdale, that she’s going to know and remember him in the hallways next year.

And he’s annoyed because Nick already likes her better than he does Hal. Nick likes outspoken, chatty people, like himself, and Hal’s always sensed that he tires sometimes of Hal’s inability to hold a conversation. He can already visualize the rest of the summer – Alice and Nick and Noelle getting along like wildfire, and himself sticking out like a sore thumb, dragging along like a log jam in a river, somebody that no one wants there.

Hal can’t shove his hands in his pockets with his apron on, so he compromises by balling them up by his sides.

 _You’re overreacting_ , he tells himself. _Don’t be a baby._ It was his own fault if no one liked talking to him, and it was his own fault if he couldn’t be around someone in his class without feeling like an idiot. No one else was to blame. 

“Fine,” he says, forcing back the alarming pressure of tears building behind his eyes. “I’ll show you the back room.”


	4. Alice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His annoyance with her is fading, replaced by a swelling self-consciousness that threatens to block out every other feeling. He has no idea how he’s going to survive this shift without outing himself as the most awkward person in the whole world.

The back room of the Dream Cream looks nothing like the rest of it: a cramped, tidy, cement-walled area with a few rickety storage units and a huge freezer taking up one wall. The one perk is the smell – the subtle, sugar-sweet smell of ice cream pervades even here, and the A/C mixed with the concrete keeps it cool. Alice makes a big show of inhaling deeply. 

“Smells good.”

“It’s ice cream,” mutters Hal, breaking the vow of silence he’d made to himself all of four seconds ago. Alice looks at him sharply, but says nothing. Hal blushes to the roots of his hair. He hadn’t meant to be rude, it had just slipped out. But now he couldn’t take it back.

The shipment ends up being easy to unpack: some boxes of paper cups, a few boxes of napkins, and a hefty stack of boxed plastic spoons in rainbow colours. Hal shows her where each item fits on the shelves, and Alice stacks them neatly and effortlessly, rising on her toes every so often when her Doc Martens don’t add enough of a boost. 

“Is that all?” she asks when the flat is empty.

“Guess so,” says Hal, disappointed to learn that the entire endeavor had only taken them fifteen minutes. His annoyance with her is fading, replaced by a swelling self-consciousness that threatens to block out every other feeling. He has no idea how he’s going to survive this shift without outing himself as the most awkward person in the whole world. Alice saves him by snapping her fingers at him, her voice triumphant when she speaks.

“I know where I know you from.”

Hal wonders if he wants to hear what she’s about to say. “We both know Fred,” he supplies, feeling the back of his neck grow hot. His armpits are prickly with sweat. 

Alice shakes her head, her blonde hair swaying. “Prohibition.”

“Sorry?”

“Ninth grade history! Last year. We were in Mr. Rodriguez’s class. You did your final project on prohibition. Bootlegging and speakeasies and all that stuff.” She smiles, and Hal self-consciously presses his tongue into his braces. “I thought it was really good.”

That was a nice thing to say. Hal opens and closes his mouth, trying to form words. He manages to stammer out a “thank you,” forcing himself to look in her eyes. “I don’t remember what yours was about,” he admits. 

Alice laughs glibly, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “I don’t think I handed that one in.” 

The shame comes in like the tide, blood rushing to his face as he realizes too late what her comment had really revealed about him, what Zelda Spellman must have suspected stuck in that cornfield, that Hal Cooper was an unappealing square who wore earplugs to concerts and finished his assignments on time. That his world and Alice’s were too far apart to ever meet outside of the mint-scented coolness of the _Dream Cream’s_ back room. 

The silence between them stretches into painfulness. Hal clears his throat.

“I’ll show you where the labels are,” he says, his voice sounding strained and unlike himself. “We have to cut them out.”  

* * *

Nick keeps the front of the store running easily, so that they have all morning in the back room to trim the adhesive labels Noelle designs to fit the pint cartons to size. Hal’s always been fond of the task when the owners put him up to it, finding the repetitiveness and the silent, solitary nature of the activity oddly freeing. He likes to get into his own head and just do it, enjoying the quiet and the lack of interruption.

Today, though, is different. And even though it’s different, because Alice is talking, he finds himself actually wanting to listen, easily responding to some of her incessant questions, as though they’re on the borderline of enjoying each other’s company. They’re sitting a little apart from each other in the middle of the stock room, Alice on the floor with her legs tucked under her and Hal on an overturned crate, his feet planted flat. The labels are in a pile between them, the finished ones in a separate stack off to the side.

“Who gets to name ice cream flavours?” Alice wants to know.

“I don’t know,” says Hal. He’s still nervous in her presence, but it’s countered by the relaxing familiarity of the back room, enough that he can speak without stuttering. Somehow, ice cream is easy to talk about. “Companies?”

“Some of these sound like they were named at the most boring board meeting ever,” laughs Alice, setting her scissors down so she can stretch her arms out, lacing her fingers and lifting them high above her head. Hal very consciously tries to avoid watching the lift of her ribcage under her tiny shirt, ignores the sigh she lets out as though her muscles haven’t been stretched in weeks. “Or like they had a big dartboard with the top-selling adjectives, and they just- “

She mimes throwing a dart, so that Hal laughs a little, despite himself. He’s been raised to appreciate a way with words.

“I think it’s more like two fishbowls,” Hal volunteers. “One full of words to describe the flavour, and one for just a bunch of nouns. So you have Raspberry Ripple. Or Cherry Jubilee.” 

Alice giggles and mimes pulling two words out of the air. “Chocolate— tornado. That’s really smart.” 

“Peanut Butter—” Hal thinks hard. “Parade.”

“Three words,” Alice accuses him, but dips her hand in an imaginary fishbowl anyway. “Chunky— fish.” 

Hal laughs appreciatively, and Alice scrunches her nose up, her smile bright white and beautiful. Her front two teeth have a noticeable gap. With a quick motion she sweeps the hair off her neck, scrunching her great curtain of hair up in a ponytail on top of her head before letting it go. Wavy gold locks go every which way, a long strand tumbling across her nose.

“They’re going to have a bitch of a time finding a hairnet for me,” she admits.

“Nick will probably let you just clip it back,” says Hal, averting his gaze self-consciously. “As long as it’s out of the way.” 

“I guess customers wouldn’t like that too much,” she jokes, plucking the curl out of her face. “Butterscotch hair flavour.”

Hal blushes, trying to think of something else to say. Fortunately, Alice barrels into another question, waving a green label at him.

“Why is there mint chocolate chip and mint chocolate _chunk_?” She frowns, a little crease appearing between her eyes. “What’s the difference?”

“Mint chocolate chip just has the little chocolate chips,” Hal replies. “Mint chocolate chunk has the bigger pieces, like this-” He makes a tiny O with his thumb and forefinger – “and fudge swirled in. So the chocolate-mint ratio is better.”

Alice has drawn one foot up and is reaching out to try to touch her toe. “Why make the other one, then?”

“Some people like more mint and less chocolate, I guess.”

“Lame. What’s Tiger Tail?”

“I don’t know,” says Hal. “It’s orange, but the black tastes like something else. Licorice, I think. I’ve never actually had it.”

“What, you haven’t tried every flavour here, yet?”

She says it teasingly, but something about the amusement in her tone makes all the breath rush out of his lungs, feels the way he does when his grandmother pokes his stomach at Sunday dinner, the laden humour in her tone - _Oh, you’re hungry, Hal? I would never have guessed you’d want seconds._

“No,” he says, and his tone comes out clipped and mean. “Why, because I’m fat?”

He sees uncertainty come into her eyes for the first time, and thinks maybe if he was a different person he would have relished in it. Instead, he feels ashamed for his outburst, upset for having drawn attention to his biggest insecurity. He sees her eyes flicker down to the area of his waistline, just once, but enough, and his throat closes up.  

“No,” she says slowly, delicately, as though burdened with the double whammy of talking to someone who was both stupid and emotional. “I just figured since you work here, you might have tried them.”

Hal takes a deep breath, wanting to apologize, but not knowing what to say that wouldn’t make it worse. But then her icy demeanour thaws significantly, the terseness disappearing from the lines around her mouth, and Alice shrugs and goes back to cutting. Hal tries to put the act back on, tries to be a normal teenager, the kind who knows how to make small talk in back rooms, the kind who just happened to be born confident and easy. The kind who hadn’t just made an idiot of himself in front of a person who wanted to be his friend.

“Do people buy it?”

“What?”

“Tiger Tail.” Alice shows him the name. “Do people buy it.”

“Oh. Yeah. It’s pretty popular.”

“Yuck,” Alice says decisively, and slaps the label down on the floor.

“What’s your favourite flavour?” Hal asks quickly, which took a lot of courage to say. Earlier in this conversation, he’d been rehearsing the question in his head for almost half an hour so he wouldn’t stumble on his words when he finally got up the nerve to ask. But Alice won’t let him get off easy.

“You have to guess,” she urges him, and Hal feels himself blush, even though she hasn’t said anything remotely embarrassing.

He takes a deep breath and looks at her for a while, pretending to size her up.

“Cookies and cream,” he says finally.

Alice smiles.

“Is that right?” 

“Oh. Yeah.” She smiles again. “I don’t know how you knew.” She sets her scissors aside and scoots closer to him. "You like banana pudding," she guesses. 

“Rocky Road," Hal corrects her. 

“I just cut that one out!” Alice fishes energetically around in the pile and lets out a cry of surprise when she finds the ingredients listed on the label. “Marshmallows!?” She looks up at him, eyes wide. Hal’s overcome by the blue of them under the wonky eyeliner. “For real?”

“They’re good,” says Hal.

“I’m s _o_ deprived,” she moans, stretching the O out. “I never knew you could put marshmallows in ice cream.”

She heaves a big sigh and goes back to cutting. The awkwardness of the earlier moment is lost, though Hal finds himself replaying it obsessively in his mind. He does that a lot. Runs through the top ten most embarrassing moments of his life in the shower, tries to come up with defenses for himself as if in front of an imaginary jury. 

“They seem really nice,” says Alice.

“Who?”

“The people who own it.”

“Oh. They are.” Hal’s about to tell her Nick and Noelle’s story – he wouldn’t tell just anyone that, but something about Alice makes him trust her with it - when the door of the back room creaks open and Nick pokes his head in. The hum of chatter and 50’s music pours in from the front.

“How are those labels coming?” he asks. 

Alice leaps to her feet, showing off a fistful of them. “Finished ‘em.”  

“Great job!” Nick beams paternally at her. “It’s slow up here for once. How about we teach you how to serve some ice cream?”

* * *

Somehow they all fit behind the counter: Hal, Alice, and Nick. Nick gives their newest employee a quick overview of the behind-the-counter duties, running through the prices and showing her the location of the mops, buckets, scoops, waffle mix, and extra bowls and cones. He demonstrates how to turn the waffle irons on and off, and how to use the old-fashioned till.  

“You’ll never be opening or closing without someone more experienced here, so you don’t have to worry about that. The only thing you have to worry about is making change and scooping the perfect cone.” Nick slides open their side of the display case, taking a moment to show Alice the locking mechanism. “What’s your favourite flavour?”

Alice smiles at Hal. “Cookies and cream.”

Nick beams and hands Hal the scoop. “Hal, why don’t you show her how it’s done?”  

Hal reaches obediently into the drum of cookies and cream and scrapes the ice cream into a creamy ball. Grabbing one of the cones lined up vertically at the side of the case, he packs the ice cream carefully into it. _Dream Cream_ errs on the generous side, so the single scoop oozes over the sides of the cone. Alice looks delighted.  

“You’re so good at it,” she says, as Hal wraps the cone in a napkin. “It looks perfect.”

“Alice, why don’t you make it a double scoop?” says Nick, handing her a ladle. “Then you can taste test it for us.”

Alice does. She grins at Hal with creamy ice cream and chocolate all over her teeth, and Hal feels a few of the anxious knots in his chest fizzle out like dying stars. 

He spends the rest of the morning standing behind Alice, in the perfect position to chart the constellation of moles on her back left shoulder, encouraging her as she scoops different sized ice cream cones. To her credit, Alice is a fast learner. The only thing she struggles with is packing the cones full without breaking them.

“You have to be gentle with the ice cream cones,” Hal says awkwardly when she cracks a second one in front of an impatient customer. “They’re delicate.” 

Alice watches him appraisingly as he finds her a new cone and transfers her scoop into it. 

“Gentle,” she repeats softly, as Hal passes the cone over the counter. “Like you.”

Hal doesn’t know what to say to that. But there doesn’t seem to be anything he has to say.

* * *

Alice’s training shift is scheduled to end at 2:30, which is when Hal’s finishes as well. He loiters awkwardly in the shop while Alice packs up her bag, undoing her long hair from the clip she’d used to hold it back and tossing her jean jacket over her arm. She’s chatting with Nick all the while, who looks like he’s really enjoying it, tossing his head back and laughing at everything Alice says. Somehow Hal minds it less than he had this morning.

They leave the shop at the same time, Hal headed in the direction of his neighbourhood and Alice to the bus stop. They’ve just stepped out the door when Alice abruptly spins around to face him, almost crashing into his chest.

“You’re not fat,” she blurts out.

Hal’s mouth goes dry, his heart suddenly beating so quick he can feel it in his ribs. Alice swallows and then starts to talk hurriedly, rushing over her words as though she only has so long to get them all out.

“What I mean is – I don’t care about it. And I think you look better than you think you do, and - I think you’re cool,” she says finally, her jaw tense and her eyes honest. Hal feels pinned in place. “I just wanted to tell you.”

Before Hal can react she’s turned on her heel and taken off in the direction of the approaching bus.

* * *

Alice doesn’t leave Hal’s mind for the rest of Friday, until his phone rings just before dinnertime. His mother is occupied trying to teach Gertrude how to bake bread (she insists Hal’s sister learn the fundamental skills of what she calls _being a lady_ ) so Hal reaches to pick it up.  

“I’M GOING TO KILL RICK MANTLE!” Fred yells in his ear as soon as Hal lifts the reciever. 

Hal winces, holding the phone a little way from his ear. “Hi, Fred.” He checks his reflection in the mirror, pushing his bangs over to the other side of his face as he prepares to talk his friend down from whatever huge overreaction he’s about to hear. “What’s up?”   

Sure enough, Fred’s worked himself up into full-blown crisis mode. “He’s having his birthday party this weekend! It’s MY birthday weekend! He stole my birthday!”

“Your birthday’s not on the weekend,” says Hal diplomatically. He grimaces at some acne on his chin and scrapes at the mark with his fingernail before averting his eyes from the mirror altogether.   

“Yeah, but it’s close enough! Rick Mantle’s born in SEPTEMBER!” Fred grouches. “He just wants to have a party so he can show off his biceps and his fancy house.” 

Hal can’t argue with that. “I’m sure more people will come to your party,” he says, his mind drifting to Alice again. He hadn’t asked when her birthday was. “Don’t worry.”

“I don’t know, dude, he’s got a huge house. Oh, _man_ , and his birthday cakes are legendary. He gets those ones with like, rockets in them and shit.”

Hal thinks Fred might have got some wires crossed on that one. “Cool,” he says.

“Yeah. I mean, it is gonna be cool.” Fred’s suddenly upbeat again, all thoughts of murder forgotten. “So anyway, I got an invitation and he said you could come too.” 

Something dark settles into Hal’s stomach like a stone. He’s very confident that Rick had said nothing of the sort. 

“I don’t know if Rick likes me,” he says carefully. “Besides, I’m really- “

Fred sees right through him. “He said he wanted you to come! Honest. I’m not making this up.” Hal says nothing, and Fred waits for him to speak before pushing on, his tone matter-of-fact. “It’s gonna be fun, Hal. You have to come out of your shell sometime.”

Hal bites his lip. He hasn’t been to a birthday party since the middle of ninth grade, and had spent most of it hidden in a corner of the kitchen, waiting for his mom to pick him up. He had a bad feeling they wouldn’t have improved much. 

“You’re coming,” says Fred bluntly, and Hal knows he is, whether he likes it or not, no matter if this conversation goes on for five more minutes, or fifty. “It’s tomorrow, 7:30. You can put your name on my present, even. So no excuses.”

Hal feels his shoulders slump. “Fine,” he mutters, but Fred’s already talking again, ignoring the lack of enthusiasm in Hal’s tone.

“Actually, you can have my whole present. I’m not getting him anything when he stole my birthday. I’ll buy him something in September.” Hal hears muffled yelling from Fred’s end of the phone, and Fred yells abruptly in reply. “I’M COMING! I’M ON THE PHONE!”

The line crackles, and Hal waits for Fred’s voice to reappear, somewhat subdued now that the crisis has passed.

“Okay, I got to go for dinner. I’ll see you tomorrow, though. My mom can drive.”

“Thanks,”

“Bye!”

The line goes abruptly dead in his hand, and Hal replaces it quietly in the cradle. Rick’s party is tomorrow. That means Hal has slightly less than twenty-four hours to find one thing in his closet to wear that doesn’t make him look like an idiot.

Hal glances at his calendar. He doesn’t work at the Dream Cream again until Monday afternoon, but the thought of it makes some of the weight lessen from his shoulders. Two and a half days and he’d be back in the shop again, cleaning tables off, scooping ice cream. With Alice.

No, he’s not counting the days until Monday afternoon, he realizes, heading back up the stairs to his bed. He’s counting the _hours._


	5. Alice, again.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’re clustered in a circle on the ground, a red cup or a bottle in front of every person, and they’re playing a game that Hal is only half-certain on the rules to. A gas fire is burning in the black marble fireplace, protected behind a sheet of glass.

The day of the party is drizzly and cool. Hal’s wearing a button-up shirt that he hopes gives him a better frame.

Alice hadn’t been wrong; he wasn’t as chubby as he used to be. His growth spurt before high school had evened his body weight out in a way he would have thought enviable in the seventh grade. What remains, mostly around his middle and thighs, is what his mother would have called puppy fat – acceptable when you were five years old, but unbearable as an adolescent. Still, he understands that there had been some truth in Alice’s words.

 _I think you look better than you think you do._ He runs them through his mind at night, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. Sometimes with his eyes open her face would materialize out of the darkness for him, her gold hair and long lashes, the sprinkling of freckles across her back. His electric fan hums on his dresser, the wind blowing his curtains so that the light shifts on the ceiling, and if he stares hard enough he can conjure her eyes up: blue and grey and as deep as winter.  

He doesn’t sleep much that night.

His mother had somehow caught wind of the party and had sent him off Saturday evening with a huge, luxuriously wrapped present – she kept various gift items around for just such a last-minute occasion – that he and Fred had decided was lame and left on Fred’s shelf. They’d bypassed the pool because of the weather (not that Hal had been planning on swimming anyway) and had instead clustered into the carpeted luxury of Rick’s basement den. A few of them have wet hair, because a few of them had been willing to risk life and limb swimming in a thunderstorm.

Fred is one of them. Some things never change.  

The party is discomforting and scary. Hal’s birthday parties are heavily supervised, interspersed with board games and the relentless snapping of his mother’s polaroid camera. There’s a ritual to the evening: games first, then singing, then cake and presents. Then adults file up to take you home, long before 8:30pm. December means everyone has red cheeks and ruddy noses in photos.

This is… not that.

They’re clustered in a circle on the ground, a red cup or a bottle in front of every person, and they’re playing a game that Hal is only half-certain on the rules to. A gas fire is burning in the black marble fireplace, protected behind a sheet of glass. He thinks everyone except him is drunk, but he doesn’t know enough about drinking to be sure. All he knows is that his mother would have a heart attack if she could see them.

There’s this feeling he gets in settings like this. Like he’s watching a movie, and he’s been dubiously placed in the scene without belonging there. Like he really is the most awkward person in the history of the world. 

“Never have I ever puked from drinking too much,” says Harry Clayton and a chorus of dubious scoffs rises up. This is the game. You say something you have not done, and everyone sips from their bottles if they’ve done it. Hal’s is still full.

A few people take hearty swigs, the ones that don’t look proud. Hal threw up after two chocolate milkshakes once. But he has a feeling that’s not what they’re talking about.

Fp nudges Fred. The two of them had lodged themselves just to Hal’s right so that Fred is technically upholding his promise of sitting by Hal’s side. “Drink,” FP says with a laugh, tipping the bottom of Fred’s red cup up so Fred’s forced to drink deeply from it. For a moment something rears frightened and protective up in Hal’s chest, and he almost jumps to his feet to tell FP off. But Fred emerges, grinning, from the bottom of his glass, something amber running down his chin from his smile, and the look he gives FP tells Hal his intervention wouldn’t be appreciated.

“Fred, your turn,” urges Harry Clayton, relaxed and confident, reclining against the front of a TV cabinet. The lean planes of his body, so different from Hal’s soft edges, glimmer in the firelight glow. “You puke more than anyone I know.”

“Do not,” Fred shoots back, but quickly flashes a devious glance at Rick across the circle. His grin is jack-o-lantern smug, bright in the light from the fire. Hal feels a hole open up in his chest. He hadn’t realized Fred and Rick were close enough for that kind of smile. He hadn’t realized a lot of things about tonight.

Fred takes his time, every eye on him, letting his exaggerated _hmmm…._ stretch out into the air of the room as he pretends to think, the same happy little smug smile on his mouth. Finally, he opens his lips with an audible pop, never once glancing in Hal’s direction. 

“Never have I ever been caught by a cop at Miller’s point.”

FP laughs, loud and annoying in Hal’s ear. “Come onnnnnnn,” moans Rick, rolling his eyes to the heavens, pretending not to enjoy the attention as the circle erupts into laughter and friendly jeering. Hal looks left and right and realizes he’s the only one who hasn’t heard this story. Rick moans as though unbearably upset. “You guys will _never_ let me forget that.”

He drinks, makes a big show of knocking back the very end of his cup. Hal’s hands feel clammy and cool – partly from the condensation on the beer bottle, partly from nerves. Rick straightens up, and looks thoughtfully around the circle. Then he grins, taking his time before letting his next sentence drop with surgical precision. 

“Never have I ever 69’ed someone on a school band trip.” 

Hal feels his face grow warm. He doesn’t even know what that means. But the whole crowd screams with laughter. Fred covers his face and ducks his head, but not before Hal sees the smile on his lips. A knife slides cool and solid into his gut.

Fred’s had sex. It feels like a betrayal.

“I did not, I did not-” Fred keeps protesting above the jeers, but drinks heartily from FP’s beer anyways. The laughter rises up around them like the tide coming in. Hal swallows and tries to ignore the dizzy feeling coming over him, the odd buzzing in his ears as he watches the scene as if from behind a lens. 

“Guys,” Melinda speaks up timidly, “Okay, serious question. When he - y’know – do you spit or do you swallow it?”

“Swallow!” shrieks Sierra, and knocks back some of her beer. Hal can feel himself staring openly at her, as though he’s never seen her before. This was the girl he’d been in love with in grade two, when they’d had to walk the attendance down to the office together. She, too, had had sex. Maybe all of them. Definitely all of them. Everyone but him.

“You don’t spit it out?”

“NO!” everyone screams.   

“But what if you don’t want to swallow it!?” Melinda has her arms folded, unhappy. “Like, gross.”

“When I’m with Keith, I don’t even notice,” Sierra’s saying. “You’re like, in the moment.” 

Heads nod all around the circle. Hal feels huge. Not just fat, but physically immense. Like he’s taking up all the space in the room. Like he’s going to start running out of air.

“I’m going to get another drink,” he mumbles, and rises shakily with his still-full bottle of beer clutched in his hand. He shouldn’t have bothered with the lie. No one seems to hear.   

Hal climbs the stairs to the second floor, leaving their delighted chatter behind him. The conversation doesn’t wane. He’s met with an overwhelming rush of disappointment, the certitude of knowing that his presence makes no dent in the air of a room. If Hal had never come, the party would have progressed exactly as it was now. He closes the door, exiling their voices to the downstairs. There’s a houseplant in the corner, and he upends half of his drink into it.

He walks five more feet down the hall and locks himself in the bathroom.

The tile is cool on his bare feet, the appliances modern and expensive. He sits on the closed tank of the toilet, his feet planted flatly on the floor, shame welling up from the very heart of him, wishing to disappear. One though circles his mind like a fish in a pond.

_Fred’s had sex. Fred didn’t tell me._

Okay, no, be rational. Hal didn’t even know what 69-ing someone meant.

He’d been on that band trip. Fred had sat with him on the way home.  

It feels unspeakable, and yet somehow like something he had known all along. In truth, he doesn’t know why this should surprise him anymore than Fred leaping into the pool had. Fred had always been the wild one. Those were the rules. Fred was wild and experienced and Hal was sweet, and Hal was reliable, dependable. Nice.  

Hal picks his bottle up from the floor, leaving a ring of condensation on the bathroom tile, and drinks the rest of it. The beer tastes bad, like something gone sour. He finishes it anyway, swallows it with a grimace and waits for it to reveal something to him. Hopes at the same time that he hasn’t had enough to make him vomit, though at least he’s in the right place for that. He wonders vaguely if he can stay in here until the party’s done.

Hal jumps suddenly at the sound of the doorbell on the main floor. For a terrifying moment he thinks he’s going to have to leave the bathroom to answer it, but the drumbeat of many footsteps up from the basement assuages this fear. Instead, he sits and listens as the front door opens, the loud chatter from Rick and the party guests as they’re joined by a new chorus of latecomers. The wood panel of the door that separates him from their world may as well be an ocean.

Hal sits there until the sound has moved back down to the basement, high heels clicking on the tiled floor just outside his refuge and making his stomach jump. He closes his eyes and lets his head thud back against the wall. The plan had been that Fred sleep over at his place after the party, so there was no chance of him leaving. Even if he could have called his mother to pick him up, her questions on the ride back would be unbearable.

No, Hal had to stick it out. _You have to come out of your shell sometime_ , Fred had told him.

 _I did some weird, numerical sex act on a band trip,_ Fred hadn’t told him.  

Hal loiters in the bathroom anyway – checking his hair in the mirror, washing his hands twice. His stomach is a tight knot of anxiety and his mind keeps returning to the thing he’s trying not to think about – the very real possibility that he was not only the only virgin at the party, but the only remaining virgin at Riverdale High. Possibly in the entire state of New Jersey. 

Padding softly down the tiled hall – Rick’s parents had stayed clear entirely of their eldest son’s birthday celebration, and weren’t due home until tomorrow - he cracks open the door at the top of the stairs and is met with a swelling wave of laughter. Swallowing hard, he descends the stairs, feeling more and more like someone walking to the gallows. 

The game is still going strong as he joins the re-shuffled circle, FP is gone now – maybe racking some experience of his own up in the upstairs bedrooms - Harry and Rick munching on a bowl of popcorn to his left. Hal’s hungry, but he tries to ignore it. If he were braver and thinner, he’d ask for some.  

“Never have I ever stuffed my bra,” speaks up a dark-haired girl that Hal doesn’t know.  

“DRINK, REYES!” Rick thunders, pointing at a newly-arrived Hermione, cuddled up to Fred in the space FP had vacated. Hal’s heart sinks.

“PUSH UP BRAS DON’T COUNT!” Hermione yells back at him, looking terrifyingly pretty in the firelight, her eyes and lip gloss sparkly and her hair brushed to a shine. Rick snorts, but Hermione tips back her long, slender neck and takes a drink anyway. She’d brought her own alcohol – something peach in a clear bottle.

“You drinking, Coop?” Rick’s loud voice cuts into his consciousness, followed by an obnoxious slap to his upper arm that stings when his skin comes away.

“I had some,” replies Hal anxiously. Rick doesn’t talk to him very often, and he thinks he likes it better when he’s being ignored. He looks around for his bottle before remembering he’d left it upstairs.

“Chill,” says Fred. “He can have mine.”  Hal finds a red cup thrust into his hands, the liquid inside clear and a tepid room-temperature. Hal takes a hasty sip and chokes on it. It tastes like floor cleaner.  But Rick is looking at him the same way he looked at him in fourth grade when he found out Hal slept with a stuffed toy named Pal, so he swallows it. 

“Coop stuffs his bra!” Rick speaks up.

“Don’t be a dick, Rick,” says Fred vaguely, but all of his attention is taken up by Hermione, his body turned to her like a flower turning itself to the sun, and the defense comes out bored – his mother urging Gertrude to leave him alone during a long road trip. Hal’s throat feels tight and he’s hit with a spike of sudden frustration, a years-old urge to kick Fred in the shins. _You promised you’d stick with me;_ he wants to cry. _You promised it wouldn’t be like this._

“It’s my birthday,” says Rick, pouting like a kid, and then turns abruptly away from them, Hal disappearing into complete irrelevance for him again. Hal tries to give the cup back to Fred, but he’s turned back to Hermione and isn’t paying attention. Hal wonders where FP’s gone. 

Hermione takes her time, considering. Finally, she folds her hands in her lap and announces primly to the group:

“Never have I ever done a striptease for anyone. Or a lap dance.”  

No one drinks. Hal, wishing he was anywhere but this circle, turns to see if he can figure out where FP had moved to and abruptly starts like he’s been hit. 

It’s her. From the ice cream shop. Alice of the cookies and cream. Toenails pressing just a little more into FP’s lower leg than he would ever have liked. She must have come in with the people who had just arrived, all of them a little drunk, their eyes a little too glittery in the firelight. Her hair is long and loose, the same perfect butterscotch colour he remembers. She’s in a pair of acid-wash cutoff shorts with dangling hems and a short lace top, a leather jacket abandoned a few feet from her nearly-empty bottle of beer.

As Hal watches, she sips cooly from her bottle. FP jostles her in a friendly way in response and tosses an arm around her, pulling her in like a lover until her face is hidden by his shoulder and the cascading spun-toffee curtain of her hair. The crowd of kids hoot and cheer. In front of Hal’s eyes, FP kisses Alice Smith on the head, right on her perfect gold part. For a flash of a second he sees her smile into his neck.

And oh, there it is.

Exactly what Mary had told him he needed.

Hal sits in the firelight and feels his heart break for the first time.


	6. Fred, in secret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Complicated. Summer was complicated. People were complicated – poured hidden depths out of themselves that you didn’t know they had. Hal feels frighteningly uncomplicated in the face of it all, a reflection on a very still and shallow pool.

Hal wants nothing more than to go home after the party, throw himself into bed, and stay there until Monday. But Fred’s sleeping over, which means Fred wants to talk, and play UNO, and drag the night out until morning. Hal gets him a few dozen glasses of water and loses a round of UNO on purpose, finally feigning a yawning fit that makes Fred give in and yawn too.

“Guess we should go to bed,” he says, relieved at an excuse to drop unconscious for a while. It had started pouring rain on their way home, and the raindrops are drumming hard behind his drawn curtains.

“I’m not tired,” says Fred, yawning in the middle of the phrase and flopping down onto his sleeping bag so his head hits the carpeted floor with a _thump_. Hal winces on his behalf, but Fred’s still buzzed from the alcohol – Hal had asked him to gargle with mouthwash in case Prudence came in – and doesn’t seem to feel it.

“Do you want to put your pajamas on?” Hal asks, watching what he can see of Fred’s upside-down form from the bed. Fred’s eyes are already closed, one arm thrown across his stomach, his chest rising and falling steadily. Hal watches him sleep with a jealous feeling spreading somewhere in his heart, one he doesn’t even really understand. Fred looks so relaxed, so grown-up, so at ease. So sure of himself and his place in the universe.

The bed creaks as Hal gets off it, crossing the room to his chest of drawers to root out a pair of pajamas. Hal’s bedroom isn’t what you’d call cool. It has a thin wallpaper border of frolicking puppies that cuts across the middle of the blue walls, effectively erasing all claims of coolness. He finds a red t-shirt and a pair of shorts with red stripes, excusing himself to the bathroom to change even though Fred’s fast asleep.

Fred rolls over onto his side when he comes back in, Hal carefully stepping over his friend and clicking off the star-shaped lamp above his bed. The rest of his room décor is equally juvenile: he has another blue lamp shaped like a moon on the far wall, above the puppies. A thin shelf just below the ceiling holds all his knickknacks and his only trophy – a gold cup he’d been given at the church camp Prudence made him attend for memorizing a tricky bible verse. Fred has a whole shelf of sports trophies. Sure, most of them are just for participating, but Hal hadn’t even swung that.

The only other furniture is a rickety bookshelf and matching desk. A JULY calendar with a picture of a hockey player hangs over the desk, and his blue curtains cut out the light from outside the window. Prudence kept promising that they would redecorate it sometime soon. Hal might have to hold her to it. It’s not that he doesn’t like his room; It’s just that starting your sophomore year with frolicking puppies on your walls isn’t something you do.  

Yanking the comforter up over himself, Hal rolls over so he’s facing the far wall and squeezes his eyes shut. He pats himself on the back for getting Fred to bed without revealing how uncharitable his thoughts had been toward his friend all night. Under the film of hurt from seeing FP with Alice, he’s been nagged at by a strange guilt all evening. He can feel himself neglecting his duties as a friend.

But Fred’s still awake. “Are you mad at me?” he whispers suddenly, his disembodied voice coming from the direction of the floor. Hal realizes he must not be as good at concealing his feelings as he thought he was.

“No,” Hal whispers, staring at the wall. Fred doesn’t reply, so he adds: “Why?” 

“You just seem mad.”

“Why would you say that?” 

“Because you seem like you’re mad, that’s why.” 

 _Just open your mouth_ , Hal urges himself. _Just ask. Ask if FP and Alice are together. That’s all you have to do._

“I’m not mad,” he says, instead. He rolls onto his back so he’s looking up at the roof.

“It’s not my fault if you didn’t have fun at the party. I had fun.”

Hal stares hard at the ceiling. “Well, good for you.”

Fred sits up abruptly on his sleeping bag, the fabric rustling loudly in the dark. He speaks in his normal voice, without bothering to keep it down. “You’re _really_ mad.”

“No, I’m not,” Hal whispers back. “I’m not, Freddie, just – I’m tired. Go to sleep.”

Fred flops back down and goes quiet. Hal’s chest hurts. He’s supposed to be trying to keep Fred as a friend. Not pushing him harder away. He takes a deep breath and steels himself to be vulnerable.

“Okay,” he begins, swallowing hard. He crosses his fingers under the blanket for good luck. “It’s just that – you didn’t tell me about the band trip.”

“That’s what you’re mad about?” 

“I’m not mad. Just kind of – left out?” His voice is soft, and it goes up like a question. “I guess I just feel like you never tell me anything anymore.”

He holds his breath after this admission. He’d hoped Fred would maybe agree, or apologize. But he doesn’t.

“I tell you lots of stuff.”

“Yeah,” says Hal quietly. He rolls over onto his side, into the mound of pillows.   

“Wait. Hal, wake up.” Fred stretches one skinny leg up and out over the mattress so that his foot is nudging into Hal’s side. Hal rolls over to look at him for the first time, and Fred pulls his leg back down. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think you’d want to know about that.”

“But we’re best friends,” says Hal, his voice a little more plaintive that he’d have wanted it to be. 

“You’re right. I goofed.” Fred gives him his trademark grin, half-hidden in the dark. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”   

“Thanks,” says Hal, scooting down in his blankets until the comforter is up to his chin. He feels awkward, out of place, as embarrassed as he is relieved.

Fred’s voice is tentative when he speaks. “I can tell you a secret if you want.”

Hal holds his breath. “What kind of secret?” He’s not sure he can take another sex story this late.

“But you can’t tell anyone. I mean it. You have to swear on your mother’s life.”

Hal scoots a little lower. “No way. I’m not doing that. That’s creepy.”

“You have to.” Hal looks over to see Fred’s eyes boring into him in the dark, suddenly intense. “Or your dad. Something important. Because this is a big secret, okay? And if I tell you, you’re the only one who knows.”   

Hal shivers, wondering what he’d got himself into. “Okay, I swear.” Fred stares hard at him, and Hal swallows hard. “On _my_ life.”

“Fine.”

He’s taken aback by Fred’s silence. Usually Fred is unstoppable when he has something to say, his voice tripping over itself as he rushes to get it all out. But Fred only looks away from him, toward the door and then up at the ceiling and finally the window, looking everywhere but Hal.

There are nights in Hal’s life – a lot of them, recently – that feel like Big ones. Nights where everything is yet to be decided, off-kilter, strange. Nights you come out of a different person. This is one of them. 

“Fred?” Hal prompts, wondering if he’s somehow asleep again sitting up. But Fred swallows a couple times and turns to look at him, his eyes oddly reflective in the dark. “I think- that I’m, um –“ Fred looks away again, and then back at him. “I’m gay, Hal.”

“But-“ Hal hears the words without making sense of them. He blinks a couple times, confused, feeling as though he’s missing some great piece of this puzzle. The rain on the roof seems louder than ever. “But all the girls-“

“Or like, bisexual then.” Hal recognizes it now, the laborious off-handedness in his voice, the tone of something that has been rehearsed over and over. He hears in Fred’s voice what he hears so often in his own, understands that word to be a secret and frightening one that has lived in Fred for a long time but has never been spoken aloud. Fred shrugs, sleeping bag rustling, as though it’s no big deal. “Or whatever. You know.”

“Dude, that’s fine,” says Hal. “I’m not gonna judge you or, like, anything.”

“You can’t tell!” Fred says quickly, rising up on his knees. “That kid in Greendale died. I don’t want to die.”

“I won’t. I won’t tell anyone. Cross my heart.”

Fred stares at him for a second, breathing quickly, and then lays back down on the floor. “Well, there.” Fred shifts around, and the zipper on his sleeping bag pulls against the floor. “Now you know.”

The silence stretches between them again, only it’s warmer now, friendly again. Two people in the same room, on opposite sides of the world.

“You don’t have to tell me everything,” says Hal at last, understanding the immensity of the admission. He wants Fred to know he appreciates it. “If you don’t want to. In the future. Just like, some things. Some things would be nice.”

“Okay. I promise. But you can ask too, you know. You never ask.” 

“Right. Sorry.” Hal’s quiet, staring above him. “Can I ask you something right now?”

Fred’s voice is sleepy, but there’s a note of sharp anxiety in it when he answers. Hal can sense him waiting for a shoe to drop that hasn’t. “Go ahead.”

“What’s –“ Hal falters, but then finds his voice and pushes on. “What’s 69ing? Like – I don’t know what it is.”

Fred’s tired, relieved laugh makes all the hard bits go out of his chest. “Dude, is that all? Picture the number 69.”

“Okay.” Hal waits. “And?” 

“And what? I just told you. That’s where the heads go.” 

“The- but- How does- Okay, but what do you do?” Hal’s eyebrows knit together. “What-? Fred?”

He peeks over the edge of the bed at him, but Fred’s asleep again: his mouth hanging open, one arm lying up near his head. Mystified, Hal sinks back down on the pillows. His alarm clock reads 1:30.

Maybe it was something you could look up at the library. Only he’d tried to check out a book on sex once and that hadn’t gone well at all. Maybe it was one of those things you didn’t really need to know. Or maybe it wasn’t even a real thing, and Fred was just leading him on.

Complicated. Summer was complicated. People were complicated – poured hidden depths out of themselves that you didn’t know they had. Hal feels frighteningly uncomplicated in the face of it all, a reflection on a very still and shallow pool. 

“Happy birthday,” he whispers to Fred in the dark, and closes his eyes against the pillow at last.


	7. Molly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the rest of Saturday and Sunday he’d managed to put out of his head the fact that he’d have to see Alice again. Now, hanging up the phone in the kitchen, he’s forced to face it head-on, without any kind of plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [bewareoftrips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bewareoftrips/pseuds/bewareoftrips) told me that Alice's mom's name might be Molly Smith

Hal’s mother sees him off to work on Monday with the hyper-organized relish of a school day, presenting him with a bagged lunch he hadn’t asked for and instructing him over breakfast to be sure to shine his shoes before leaving. Too nervous to complain, Hal had complied. He’d tried to place a quick call to the Andrews house – Monday was Fred’s real birthday – but the phone had simply rung out on the other end.  

For the rest of Saturday and Sunday he’d managed to put out of his head the fact that he’d have to see Alice again. Now, hanging up the phone in the kitchen, he’s forced to face it head-on, without any kind of plan. Should he tell her he was at the party? Should he ask her about the kiss? Or should he pretend none of it had every happened? Accept his lot in life as her co-worker and nothing more, and move on?

He gets to the shop too early and loiters awkwardly outside for a bit before taking a seat on a bench around the corner of the street. The morning is as cool as it ever gets in Riverdale in the summer – the sun still obstructed by cloud and a thin layer of vapor. Hal, knowing its going to be incredibly hot later, takes a deep breath to enjoy it, filling his lungs with fresh summer air.

He hates waking up early but he likes the feeling of the morning – the sleepiness of main street before all the businesses opened. He racks his brain for a solution to his problem – his paralyzing fear of seeing Alice again, knowing what he knew – but can’t settle on a solution. Still, the problem feels smaller in the warm air of the morning, like something he can worry about later.

Somehow, knowing Fred’s secret makes him feel calmer.

Which is awful, because Fred’s secret is Fred’s secret, not for Hal to carry around as a trump card over FP Jones, even in his own mind. Yet he feels rock-steady and stable knowing that Fred had told him first, had trusted him fully. Fred had slipped him an ace when he thought he was out of the game.

Which is bad too, because people aren’t poker chips. It’s just that FP seems to somehow take everything of his nowadays – always FP, again and again, like he’d plotted somehow to relieve Hal of everything that mattered the most. And yet he can’t fault FP for it. How can he fault someone for wanting to be Fred’s friend, for falling in love with a girl as perfect as Alice Smith?

He understands now that there exist two Alices in the world – one was the Alice whose face he’d conjured up in his dark bedroom, the dream Alice he’d spent a shift with last week and who had paid him attention, and smiled at him, and made him fall in love. And then there was the real Alice, the Alice who exists out in the world apart from him, the Alice he doesn’t really know and has no claim to. Alice who has a whole life of her own that he’s ignorant to, to whom Hal Cooper is only a blink in a bright and dazzling existence. That was the Alice he had to accept. 

At 7:43, he rises from the bench and walks extra-slowly to the front of the store. The wooden bench creaks when he gets up, and he glares distrustfully at it. He’s willing to bet that neither Fred nor FP will ever in their lives rise from a bench and worry about breaking it. It will never occur to them at all. 

“Hal!” Noelle greets him, all smiles, wiping off the counter. She’s wearing a pink polka-dot scarf in her hair. “Come on in and tell me about your weekend.”

Hal steps into the pink-and-black room and inhales the smell of sugar. It doesn’t work today. His nerves feel strung-out and on edge, his heart thrumming quicker behind his ribs as he realizes Alice could be here at any moment.

For awhile, though, Alice doesn’t show up, and Hal begins to think that maybe she isn’t scheduled to work. That it might be only himself and Noelle again, and they could work in a comfortable silence, as though nothing had changed. But at 9:01 on the dot, the door swings open to admit the familiar clomp of Doc Martens. Hal’s heart sinks. 

She’s wearing blue today – on her eyelids as well as her shirt, a tank top that’s cut so low in the front that Hal blushes. She’s in the same denim skirt he’d seen before, with the artistic stitching up the sides. It makes the whole outfit look even more vibrant, like she was a brightly coloured bird who had blown in from the tropics. Her eyes have a hint of green in the sunlight.

“Alice, you look beautiful in that colour,” says Noelle. That was the kind of adult Noelle was. A different adult would have told Alice that a tank top that barely covered your breasts and slipped up toward your belly button wasn’t okay for work. But Noelle doesn’t say that. And just like that, Alice straightens up and brushes her hair back and fixes her cleavage a bit so that Hal stops feeling like his stomach is caught in a vice. That was the thing about Noelle – she made you want to be the best version of yourself.

“Hi, Hal,” she says, turning her blue-green eyes on him, and Hal – still undecided as to how to play this – only gulps and nods like an idiot. Alice slips under the counter and ties an apron around herself, fortunately obscuring her bare midriff with the pink-coloured lace.

“How was your weekend, Alice?” asks Noelle, and Hal waits anxiously for her to say something about the party. But Alice just shrugs, and gives the same answer Hal had.

“Okay, I guess.”

For a while, everything is okay. Alice wipes down tables while Hal and Noelle work the front, and then Noelle sends Hal to tidy the back room while she gives Alice a lesson on the cash. At ten, however, Noelle sticks her head in the back room.

“I’m just running to the bank,” she tells Hal. “Alice is doing great on the cash, but if you could scoop for her, that would be awesome. And help her out if she needs it, okay?”

“Okay,” says Hal, dread filling his stomach. Whatever their flirtation had been on Friday, it was over now, and he didn’t want to find out what remained. “Okay.”

They work in silence when Noelle leaves. There are moments where he can sense Alice trying to make conversation, but she catches on quick that Hal isn’t in a chatty mood. He keeps one eye on the clock as Alice cheerfully rings up customers, wondering if he might be able to make it through this shift after all. They work well together as co-workers, if nothing else, and Alice isn’t going to make him talk to her. Maybe he could live with it. Maybe-

But Alice doesn’t stay quiet. 

“Why does everyone buy the burnt toffee?” she grouches eventually, gathering her long hair into a scrunchie, after selling their fourth cone of the hour in that flavour. “It sounds gross.”

“I like it,” says Hal, forgetting his desire not to engage. He can’t have Alice thinking burnt toffee is anything less than miraculous. “It actually tastes really good.” 

“Oh.” She looks at him, frowning a little. “Maybe I can buy one at lunch and see what it tastes like.”

“We’re allowed to try them, you know,” Hal offers, and Alice looks dubious.

“Really?” 

Hal reaches into the display as reply with one of the sample spoons and gets her a scoop of the flavour. Alice smiles hugely as he hands it to her. She sticks the spoon in her mouth and swallows it thoughtfully, considering. Then her eyes grow suddenly wide. 

“I like it!” she gasps. “It’s good!” She turns to Hal, a light smudge of caramel on her upper lip. His heart throbs. “It’s really good!” She licks the plastic spoon again, as though trying to draw the flavour out of nothing. “Now you have to try one.” Grabbing a bright green spoon from the top of the display, she scoops up a spoonful of tiger tail and hands it to him.

“Ooh,” Hal licks the spoon thoughtfully. “It’s very orange. Do you want some?”

Alice mimes gagging. “No, yuck.”

“You were wrong about the burnt toffee,” Hal needles, feeling more at ease. Warning bells go off in his head. It isn’t allowed to be this easy for him. “You could be wrong again.” 

“No.” Alice says firmly. She slips a yellow spoon out of the container. “Close your eyes and guess what flavour this is.” 

“We can’t go overboard,” Hal cautions her. “We shouldn’t abuse the privilege.”

“Just one more!” 

Hal closes his eyes obediently and opens his mouth, nerves swelling up in his gut like butterflies. She bumps his braces with the spoon before getting it right in his mouth and he swallows quickly, hoping to avoid the awkward possibility of hitting her fingers with his lips. He presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth, trying to place the aftertaste.

“Moose tracks.”

“Right.” Alice looks suitably impressed, eyes shining. “Now do me. Just one.” 

Hal waits until she’s closed her eyes. Deciding to be nice, he plunges the sample spoon into the vat of cookies and cream. He looks anxiously at her hands – electric blue nail polish, chipped, decorates every nail – wondering if he should slip the spoon into her hand instead of feeding it to her. But she keeps her palms flat against her thighs so he steels his nerves and puts the spoon in her mouth. 

“Mm!” She lights up all over, her hand flying up to grab the spoon from him and brushing the back of his hand. His skin tingles. “That’s the one that – the cookies and cream,” she adds in, quickly, sucking the spoon dry.

“Yeah,” says Hal, and then, unnecessarily, “your favourite.”

“You remembered,” she says, truly surprised, as though no one has ever remembered something so trivial before, and Hal has to remind himself that this Alice Cooper is off-limits to him – Alice who does stripteases and must know and experience all kinds of sex things, possibly with FP, who possibly would laugh at Hal if she knew anything about him. Who might _definitely_ laugh at Hal if he ever reveals he’d been at that party where FP had kissed her, and had just been too stupid and shy to bring it up. And now it was too awkward to. _It’s over._

A father with his two children has approached the cash register, so Alice hurries back over to take their orders. Hal packs the ice cream cones for them – one chocolate, one fudge ripple, and one raspberry ripple. The man smiles and tells them both to have a nice day. 

“Hey, if I was a prohibitionist,” Alice says as they leave. “Or, a bootlegger, I mean. I would have an ice cream shop. And I’d fill one of these with moonshine, and you’d have to ask for the secret flavour.” 

“Good idea,” says Hal, admiring her, but something in his tone must have turned cold or disinterested (it’s over) because she doesn’t pursue the topic. He steps a little away from her to keep the throbbing in his heart from being unbearable, focusing on restocking the waffle cones on the rack. They’d have to make some more soon.

He’s rolling the pre-made ones in sprinkles when Alice talks to him again.

“Look at that guy,” She says, nodding across the shop.  

Hal turns. An older gentleman in a suit with shorts is browsing the pints in the freezer by the door. His thinning hair is combed over the top of his head to give the illusion of new growth. “What?” Hal asks. 

“He has a glass eye! Don’t you see?”

Hal looks closely at the man until he sees it – one of his gray eyes is not moving.

“I’d love to have a glass eye,” says Alice. If anyone bothered you, you could just-

She sticks her crooked finger in her cheek and pulls it, making a truly horrible popping sound so that Hal recoils. “And then throw it at them. No one would bother you again.” 

Hal turns to look at the man, who’s now preoccupied with picking some lint off the knee of his shorts. He has two containers of ice cream in his hand, but the labels are turned so that Hal can’t see the flavours. 

“What do you think he does?” Alice asks Hal.

“A pirate,” Hal offers.

“Oooh.” Her eyes sparkle. “I think he’s a teacher. And on the first day of class he takes his eye out and all the girls faint.”

They hush abruptly as the man begins to walk up to the counter, his selection made. Alice doesn’t move toward the register so Hal takes over, ringing the cartons through and asking the man if he wants a bag. He does his best to treat him as any other customer, looking him directly in the eyes. He hears Alice giggle, turning away to the milkshake machines to stifle it, and has to bite his lip to keep from laughing too.

“Three-fifty,” he tells the man, and bags his two cartons of ice cream for him. The Dream Cream uses paper bags, because Nick and Noelle are environmentalists. The man tips his head and smiles and goes out the door. 

“Pirate,” Alice agrees. “Definitely.”

They fall back into silence when the man with the glass eye leaves, but the air of the room is different. Warm again, like it had been on Friday. He’s mopping the corner that never gets mopped – the little square right below the cash – when Alice nudges him again, playing the same game.

“Look at that woman. Look at how she’s dressed.” 

Hal recognizes the blonde woman by sight – she lives in one the houses right in Fred’s neighbourhood, your average suburban PTA mom. Admittedly the tailored blazer and straight skirt are a bit much, especially for so hot a day, but she looks like any one of his mother’s friends – the outfit off-set with a series of gold chains around her neck, and opal rings winking from her fingers. Alice is smiling at her.

 “She looks like my mom.”

“What’s your mom like?” Hal asks, meaning to commiserate with a story about Prudence’s overbearingness. His only ability to relate to other kids his age was by complaining about his parents, though he always felt oddly guilty afterward, and prayed they would never find out. But Alice’s answer surprises him.

“I don’t know. She died when I was little. So when I was a kid, I would pick out random women in public and imagine that was what my mom was like.” She says it unselfconsciously, without a trace of sadness. “She looks like I would have picked her.”

Hal turns to look at the woman again, and thinks he can see it – a faint resemblance in the proud tilt of their heads, if nothing else. The woman catches him looking and smiles thinly, taking two pint cartons out of the freezer and clicking her way up toward the cash register as if in a hurry. Her low-heeled shoes make a rhythmic sound on the tile.

“Can I pet your dog?” Alice asks when the woman comes up to the cash. Hal, confused, turns to look out the front door and notices a black-and-white Dalmatian tied to a bike rack. The dog’s leash is the same pink as the woman’s nails. She blinks, surprised, her coral lips twisting into a pursed expression. But then she smiles and shrugs.

“If you like.”

So Alice follows the woman boldly out to the front of the store, her apron strings hanging long in the back where she hadn’t managed to tie them in a bow. Hal watches her through the glass door as she bends down to pet the dog, a huge smile on her face. She says a few words to the woman before the woman and the dog walk away. 

“She told me to wash my hands,” says Alice when she comes back behind the counter.

“Who, the dog?”

“No, silly, the mom.” Alice turns to the small, mint-coloured sink in the counter and scrubs her hands with soap. Hal eyes her dangling apron strings again, almost gracing the floor, and wants to tie them up for her. Only it might be weird.

“Your apron’s coming loose,” he says. “Do you want help?” 

“Please.” 

Hal ties it reverently in a bow, pulling the loops the way Prudence taught him so that they’re the same length. Alice gives him a big smile when she turns around, and Hal feels a horrible pit of confusion open up in his chest. He still likes her. She’s won him over all over again, and he couldn’t stay upset with her if his life depended on it.

He doesn’t understand how someone so nice can let FP Jones kiss them. 

Hal’s shift ends an hour before Alice’s, so she stays behind the counter while he takes off his apron and shoulders his backpack. Noelle is in the back room. Remembering it’s Fred’s birthday, he digs Fred’s favourite out of the pint freezer – peanut butter ice cream with peanut butter fudge sauce and whole peanut butter cups. Alice watches him do it. 

“I didn’t get him anything,” she says anxiously as she’s ringing him up, opening her hand palm-up for the change. 

“That’s okay,” says Hal, dropping the money in her hand. “I don’t think he cares. He’s probably going to have a birthday party next weekend, anyway. He was all upset because Rick stole the last one.” 

Oh. He’d mentioned the party. Hal’s feels redness rush to his face, all the way down his neck, probably making him look like a tomato. But Alice is working a crumbly five-dollar bill out of her jean pocket, and doesn’t seem to notice.

“Give him this,” she says, offering Hal the fiver.

“No, that’s okay,” says Hal. It seems wrong to take that money, more wrong than stealing.   

“Hal,” she snaps, and the sound of his name in her mouth is enough to start his heart beating again, harder than ever. “Give him this, and just tell him it’s from Alice, okay?” 

“Okay,” says Hal, his tongue dry, and takes the five with nerveless, sweaty hands. He slips it into his pocket and picks up his bag of ice cream. “I’ll see you around.” 

“See you,” she says thoughtfully, moving a lock of her spun-toffee hair to her mouth and chewing on it, and even though he knows its unsanitary and wrong, Hal thinks it’s the cutest thing he’s ever seen.

“Hal,” she calls suddenly, when he’s headed for the door. “Come back.”

Hal turns, wondering if he’d left something behind the counter. But Alice only leans across the display to him, long hair puddling on the glass, a gesture of sharing a secret even though she speaks in her normal voice. 

“Cookies and cream isn’t my favourite flavour. I don’t have a favourite flavour. But you guessed that one so I said yes. And you know what? You were right.”  

Hal just stares at her, his heart beating harder and more painful than ever.

But she only smiles at him, her eyes and nose crinkling up, and it hits him suddenly that this is one of those moments he wishes his memory was photographic. Alice smiling, her crooked teeth, the freckles on her nose, hair tucked behind her left ear and falling all over to the right, one long gold strand free on the left side. He doesn’t know what to say to that, but it doesn’t matter. She slips back down off the counter, scoops herself a mouthful of Cotton Candy, and pops the spoon in her mouth.   

His throat feels thick, his head light and fuzzy. “Goodbye,” he says.

“Goodbye,” she says, dropping the plastic spoon in the sink and beaming.  

He isn’t sure how he makes it across the shop to the door. All he knows is that he turns one last time to the shop window when he’s out, a confused, hopeless misery soaking up through the fog of joy, and knows beyond a doubt that none of this is over. That it’s barely even begun.   

 _Goodbye_ , he recites in his head all the way to Fred’s house. His hands leave sweaty marks on the paper bag of ice cream. Had he said it all right, should he have been less casual? _Goodbye, Alice._

“Alice asked me to give you this,” he tells Fred later, savouring her name in his mouth, like the best flavour of ice cream he’s ever tasted in his life.

Imagine what it would be like to kiss her.


	8. Questions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If Hal had a list of all the things he knew about Alice, it would go like this.

If Hal had a list of all the things he knew about Alice, it would go like this.

_Alice Smith. Fifteen._

_Eyes: Blue. Hair: the exact colour of spun toffee._

_Favourite flavour of ice cream: cookies and cream._

_Bad habits: Chews on the ends of her hair. Talks back to customers._

_Friends with FP._

_Also friends with Fred._

_Didn’t do her history project last year._

_Knows how to give a lapdance._

_Or a striptease. (What’s the difference?)_

_Probably knows what 69ing is._

Here he would pause, take the list, and look at it – nine bullet points laden with insecurity, a promise contained in them that the girl on this page would never look at him twice, except to laugh. He would curse the unwritten uncertainties – probablys and maybes and things he did not know. Things he needed still to discover. 

It feels impersonal, an oft-repeated mantra of his own inadequacy rather than a symposium of things he loves about her. He would crumple it and try again.

_ Things I know about Alice:  _

  1. _Her clothes always match._



That denim skirt, the one with the red thread running up the side, the one that makes him remember Fred with his hand in Zelda’s hip-pocket, his persistent longing to rub the hem of it between his thumb and forefinger, to pull her in by the belt loops, maybe, if he got lucky. Her fishnet tights and the little diamonds of skin.

  1. _She’s funny and good with words._


  1. _She lost her mother when she was young._


  1. _She makes me feel –_



And here he would list three words.

_Hopeful?_

~~_Special?_ ~~

_Alive?_

Heart racing, he would crumple this mental list and start a new one. Things he didn’t know about Alice, that would be a better list.

_THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT ALICE:_

_Is she flirting when she talks to me like that? (Annotation: ask Fred how flirting works.)_

_Does she secretly laugh at me when she goes home?_

_Why did FP kiss her like he had done it before? (Annotation: You can ask Fred, you know. Or Alice. Or ANYONE. Unless you just don’t want to know.)_

And last of all, the one he circles with his mental pen, the ink sinking deep enough into the page that he could read it with his fingertips like braille, his heart feeling as dark and as heavy as lead.

_Where do the bruises on her face come from?_


	9. Alexander Cabot III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s that day - the day of the second bruise - when Alexander Cabot the Third comes in. Hal knows this because the teenager introduces himself as such, flashing his silver credit card and fixing Alice with the dark lenses of his designer shades, rattling his lengthy name off as though it’s part of his order.

Alice shows up to work on Wednesday with a braided choker around her neck, a black T-shirt that smelled like cigarette smoke, and a scowl so deeply set on her face that Prudence would have warned her it would stick like that. Nick, greeting her cheerfully in the middle of a story about his youngest son wiping out on waterskis, suddenly trails off and goes quiet. Hal had zeroed in on the table he was wiping to spare himself the indignity of being caught blushing at the very sight of her, and looks back up. 

Nick is standing still, his eyebrows pushed together in what Noelle refers to as his thinking face. Alice lingers in the doorway, bag hanging from one hand, one Doc Marten sticking out in a defensive pose. When no one says anything she stomps behind the counter, yanking off her purse and banging forcefully over to the register to clock in. As she pushes past him, Hal notices what he hadn’t before - a kaleidoscope bruise, half-hidden under makeup, huge beside her right cheekbone and running up through her eyebrow. 

His stomach turns over. 

The dark cloud of her mood hangs over them like the beginning of a rainstorm. Finally, Nick pushes the cash register closed and turns to them with a warm smile that Hal’s only half-certain is fake. 

“Hal, can you take care of things up here for a bit?” Nick asks. “I’m going to show Alice how to stock the freezer.” 

They’re in the back room together for a long time. When they come back, Alice’s eyes are pink around the edges, like she might have cried. Nick’s face is unreadable, his smile still on, but strained. Alice’s temper hasn’t abated - she starts ladling waffle mix into the waffle irons so erratically that it sprays the walls. If Nick thinks to reprimand her, he keeps it to himself. 

“I have to run an errand,” he says after a half hour of Alice banging drawers. “You two will be okay alone for awhile?” 

Alice says nothing, so Hal nods assent. “No problem.” 

“Thanks, buddy,” says Nick, which makes Hal feel special, even though most of his mind is taken up by Alice - the huge, hot, stormcloud of her by his side, loose hair swaying close enough to tickle the bare crook of his arm. Nick grabs his bag (his purse, Noelle always teases him) and leaves with a quick, certain gait. As soon as he’s gone, Alice bangs open the drawer of maraschino cherries and starts eating them one by one. 

Hal watches her do it, awed and a little afraid. Alice calms down after that, closes the cherry drawer with a tenderness that’s almost apologetic. Rallying his courage, Hal tentatively points out the Greendale school crest on the backpack of of a curly-haired kid in a denim jacket, and they begin speculating on his age and story as though nothing had changed. Yet Hal can’t keep his eyes off her cheek. 

“I walked into a door, okay?” she snaps, finally catching him staring. “It’s not funny.” 

“I’m sorry,” Hal stammers, though he hadn’t been laughing. Alice turns away from him, rage simmering in the air around her, but then turns back, regret and sadness in her eyes that is worse than the anger. 

“Sorry,” she says. “It’s not a big deal.” 

* * *

But she comes in the next day with another one - it’s Noelle this time who notices it, dark and painful under her jaw, and tips Alice’s head up to look with all the tenderness of a parent. Alice wiggles away from her careful hands like a slippery fish. 

“I walked into a door,” says Alice, again. Hal’s stomach feels cold and sick. 

Hal doesn’t know a lot about life, but he knows you don’t walk into a door two days in a row. You really, really don’t. 

It’s that day - the day of the second bruise - when Alexander Cabot the Third comes in. Hal knows this because the teenager introduces himself as such, flashing his silver credit card and fixing Alice with the dark lenses of his designer shades, rattling his lengthy name off as though it’s part of his order.

“Two chocolate cones for Alexander Cabot the Third.” He cracks his gum, wafting spearmint over the counter. “Make it quick.” 

Alice looks at Hal, one eyebrow raised above her bruise, and Hal feels minutely cheered at the fact that they’re going to laugh about this later. Alice hasn’t been in a laughing mood of late. She punches in the order while Hal sets about scooping the cones, digging for the very last of the plain chocolate at the bottom of the bin. 

The first cone he fills too full and cracks down the middle. He transfers it carefully to a second cone, and puts the pieces of the first into the garbage. Resting the cone in one of the ice cream holders, he returns to the tub of chocolate to fill the second. Alexander Cabot the Third looks at an exorbitantly expensive diamond wristwatch and lets out a sigh. 

Then he opens his mouth, the words falling off his tongue as easy as water. 

“You wanna hurry it up there, chubby?” 

The sound of the ice cream shop seems to muffle in Hal’s ears, so that he can hear the blood in his head. His fingers go slack and stop working, the second ice cream cone tumbling from his grip into the bottom of the bin. It’s nothing, he tells himself, ears burning and forehead throbbing, especially compared to Alice and her bruises, it’s nothing he hasn’t heard before, at least, and yet his eyes feel fuzzy and his throat too tight to swallow, like the embarrassment is a golf ball in his trachea. It’s twice as bad in front of her. 

“Take it back.” 

Hal looks up from the bin, blinking hurriedly to keep tears out of his eyes, and his vision refocuses on Alice, her arm extended over the counter and a silver switchblade knife in her hand, pointing it directly at their customer. The sight lands like a punch to the face. At first Hal can’t believe what he’s seeing. But the moment drags on, all three of them frozen, his heart skipping beats like he’s missed a step going downstairs, and the knife is still in her hand. 

“You take it back,” Alice repeats, dreadfully calm, “or I’ll cut your balls off and serve them to you in a sundae.” 

Alexander Cabot the Third, for probably the first time in his life, is speechless. 

“Alice,” squeaks Hal, her name the only thing in his head, eyes fixed on the blade - a dangerous three inches, at least, the handle jet-black and patterned with what looks like snake scales. His stomach is up in his throat and his bladder feels ten seconds from letting go. Yet Alice’s hand never wavers. A thousand questions are swirling around in Hal’s head  - how, what,  _ why _ \- but he can’t speak. The heavy ice cream scoop drops from his hand and lands on the floor with a clang. 

Alex Cabot looks like he’s already lost any control over his urinary functions. The dark-haired teenager swallows, eyes comically huge in his face, his hands shakily making their way into the air as though he’s being held up. It’s as much the expression on Alice’s face as it is the presence of the knife. If Hal hadn’t known her, he would have thought her capable of murder. 

“Alice,” croaks Hal again. “what are you-” 

“Apologize,” says Alice, her voice deadly, and Alexander Cabot squeaks out an “I’m sorry” that’s directed to the tip of her knife. Alice lowers it slightly and he takes the opportunity to scuttle backward, his eyes so big that Hal can see all the whites around them. 

“STOP.” thunders Alice, the blade still held out in front of her, and Alex Cabot jumps like he’s been shot. “Take your ice cream.” 

He does. Alice snaps the knife closed with the sound of a spring unloading, and then the bell above the door is the only indication that their customer had been there in the first place. At that very moment, Noelle pushes her way out of the back room, arms laden down with two boxes of ice cream pints. 

Noelle takes inventory of their stunned expressions, the ice cream scoop on the floor, the cone still in the holder, dripping melted chocolate over the top of the glass case. 

“Everything okay?” she asks, a little furrow appearing in between her eyebrows. 

“Yeah,” says Alice sweetly, her voice all milk and sugar and her eyes sparkly. Hal looks at the bulge in her back hip pocket and thinks twice about ever putting his fingers anywhere near there. “Peachy keen.” 

* * *

They don’t talk about it until the end of the shift. Hal hides his shaking hands under the register and Alice hums a little tune as she sweeps the floor, more cheerful than she’s been in days. 

“You didn’t have to do that,” Hal manages to say once they’re out into the sun. 

“He didn’t have to say that.” And then, out of nowhere, Alice’s hand fits in his and squeezes it. “Walk with me to the park?” 

Hal does. Maybe he ought to be more concerned about the fact that this girl carries - is still carrying - a three-inch switchblade on her person, but his mind space is occupied with the much more potent fact that Alice hasn’t yet dropped his hand. That he, Hal Cooper, is holding a girl’s hand. For real. 

They sit on a bench by the bike path, and Alice bounces her knee like a nervous schoolgirl. Across the field, a bunch of little kids are playing on the splash pad. 

“I shouldn’t have done it,” Alice admits, drawing a line through the dirt with her toe. Her knee is still jiggling, so the line comes out wobbly. “Now you probably never want to see me again, right?” 

“No,” Hal says quickly, and Alice looks up at him. There’s something like hope in her eyes. 

“Alice, why did you-” 

“Because he can’t get away with that,” she snaps.

“But he’s right.” 

“So what?” Alice challenges him. Her eyes are bright and hot, and Hal’s suddenly aware that he’s never been more close to her, even doing up her apron strings. She plants a hand on his thigh, and even though it’s the most hated part of his body, he feels a swirling kind of joy as her palm comes into contact with his flesh. 

“What are you thinking?” she asks, her face very close to his. 

“I-”There are a million things in Hal’s head, but only one of them sticks. “Do you remember the party?” 

“What party?” 

“I was at Rick Mantle’s birthday party,” Hal says awkwardly, no longer certain where he was going with this, only that it needed to be said, that her touch had spurred him into a confession. Alice wrinkles her nose, drawing back. 

“God, were you? What a stupid night. FP and I were so drunk.” 

FP and I. Hal hates the closeness of their pronouns. He wants to use a car jack to separate the two words. Alice tilts her chin up so the bruise on her neck shines through the makeup, and Hal feels a jolt in his gut. 

He can’t believe what he’s thinking sometimes. And yet he remembers FP tipping that cup up for Fred to drink from it, the amber pouring down Fred’s chin, his throat trembling as he struggled to swallow. The malice he saw in FP’s eyes sometimes. 

No, that was ridiculous. Worse, that was wishful thinking from the most perverse part of his mind, the one that was hopefully trying to write FP the villain and himself the hero. He buries the thought. Fred was FP’s friend. Fred would never hang out with someone who could hurt like that. 

There’s too much noise in his head. His thigh feels like it’s on fire. He stares at the purple crescent on her lower jaw, and a wish spills open in his head like a flower unfurling. 

_ I wish I could stick up for you the way you stick up for me.  _

“Yeah?” Hal hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud, but a smile floats over Alice’s face, a tenderness in her gaze that rearranges her face into softness. Alice sighs and leans her head against his shoulder, her blonde hair swinging down, and Hal has the persistent and awful thought that he’s dreaming. None of this would ever happen when he was awake. His stomach is a bundle of nerves that has nothing to do with the knife. 

“Alice!"

He recognizes the dark figure speeding toward them with an odd jolt. FP’s appearance feels like a punishment for his earlier thought, ruining the vibrating potential of their moment. Alice snaps her head up off of Hal and FP pulls up in a spray of sand, on a black ten-speed bike with wheels that are so red with rust that they look like they’re bleeding. 

FP jumps off. His eyes rove over Hal as though he’s part of the furniture before landing back on Alice’s face. He smells like cigarettes, and with a pang Hal recognizes the shirt he’s wearing as the one that had been on Alice’s back yesterday. 

“What are you doing here?” 

“What are  _ you  _ doing here,” Alice counters. FP juts his chin out, looking like an annoyed little kid. “You’re making no money from slumming it on the Northside.” 

“Was at Fred’s house.” He looks at Hal again. “Hi, Cooper.” 

“Hi.” The skin of his thigh sears as Alice pulls her hand away. She hops up off the bench, Doc Martens landing with a thump in the sand. Hal gets the feeling that she’s rushing away from him, and his heart feels hollow and hurt. 

“We going to this meeting or not?” FP is talking over Hal’s head as though he doesn’t exist. Alice makes a furious motion at FP that Hal translates as _ shut up _ , though he doesn’t understand why. The three of them feel like three points of a triangle, three burning, anxious stars. 

FP is back on his bike, lighting a cigarette. “Are you getting on?” 

“I’ll walk.”

“You’ll be late.”

“Fucker.” Alice climbs onto the back of his bicycle and FP turns to look at Hal one last time, his eyes bored and cold, the cigarette dangling out of his mouth as though it might fall. He has a tiny, mouth-shaped bruise on the skin of his adam's apple. Hal doesn't know much about sex, but he knows what a hickey is. 

“Bye Hal,” Alice says, and then mouths, “Sorry.” 

“Bye,” says Hal, caught in the whirlwind of her, helpless to do anything but let FP pedal away with the girl of his dreams on his back. 

Yes, the girl of his dreams. Even after she’d pulled a knife on someone in front of him. 

Maybe especially after that. 


	10. Rodger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It happens as quickly as that. The emotional high Hal’s been riding since the day in the park crashes to below zero. He hates himself for it, but he can feel himself drawing back into his shell, barely exchanging a word with Nick and Noelle in the mornings and stumbling over phrases when he tries to make Alice laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAPPY BIRTHDAY KIM I HOPE YOU HAVE A GOOPY ICE CREAM KIND OF DAY!!! I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!!

At least one of the questions on Hal’s mental list is answered the day FP Jones clumps into the ice cream parlour. FP doesn’t say a word at first, only awkwardly slips across the tile floor and stands by the register, clothed in dark jeans despite the hot day and a leather vest that’s too big for him.

“I came to see Alice,” he announces finally, chewing his lip, shifting from foot to foot in front of the counter. He looks out of place in the pink-and-teal dreamland of the ice cream shop, a dark blotch on the landscape. Hal feels vaguely nervous at his presence, if only for the fact that FP could probably kick his ass in a fight. He looks at Nick.

“She’s not in,” says Nick cheerfully. “Sorry, FP.” 

“Oh.” FP looks awkwardly around, toying with the frayed collar of his Metallica T-shirt. When Alice doesn’t suddenly materialize from thin air, he swallows and shoves his hands in his pockets.

“I guess I’ll get an ice cream then.”

He hovers too long looking at the flavours, breathing on the glass so that the hair on the back of Hal’s neck prickles, his hands itching to reach for the cleaner and wipe the ghost of FP’s breath and spit away. “Chocolate,” FP finally grunts embarrassedly, and Hal scoops him a single cone.

Hal stands holding it while FP shuffles through his pockets for money, growing more and more annoyed as the brunette stacks quarters on the counter. Even Fred had the decency to carry a wallet. 

“Put it away, FP,” says Noelle suddenly from behind him. “Your money’s no good here.”

“Perks of dating a lady who works in an ice cream shop,” says Nick, and wraps his arms around Noelle’s waist to give her a squeeze. With a pang Hal recognizes the same jovial, paternal voice he uses with him, and with another pang, he realizes what the phrase implies.

FP snorts. “Would have started dating her earlier if I knew I got free ice cream.”

He looks at Hal expectantly, who freezes up before realizing FP’s waiting for his ice cream cone. He rushes to hand it over, ignoring a drip of chocolate that escapes the bottom scoop. Nick reaches out quickly and catches it with a napkin, wrapping it around the cone with expert hands and sparing FP’s knuckles from the drip. FP mumbles a thank you and doesn’t meet Nick’s eye.

The door bangs as he leaves. Hal’s stomach feels like he’s missed a step going down the stairs.

“Your fella was in,” Noelle says discreetly to Alice later, as Alice is clocking in and Hal is hanging up his apron.

“My fella?”

“FP. Nice boy.” Hal peeks through his arms to see them, and his stomach goes sour when he sees Noelle beaming. Alice is facing away from him, and he can’t see her face. “Everything all right with you two?” 

“Everything fine,” says Alice, and as she turns to fix her apron string in the front Hal just catches a glimpse of her smile.

* * *

 

It happens as quickly as that. The emotional high Hal’s been riding since the day in the park crashes to below zero. He hates himself for it, but he can feel himself drawing back into his shell, barely exchanging a word with Nick and Noelle in the mornings and stumbling over phrases when he tries to make Alice laugh. Fred would have been rushing full steam ahead into some incredible plan to get a happy ending, but Hal isn’t Fred. Hal doesn’t know how to justify his own feelings. He doesn’t know how to ask _why did you hold my hand if you were dating FP the whole time,_ though it seems like the simplest question to ask.

He tries eating to quench the hurt, digging a sample spoon into the butternut fudge between customers, but even that no longer holds its potency. He takes two pints of mint chocolate chunk home (chunk, not chip), reads the calorie content once, and banishes them to the back of the freezer with tears in his eyes.

His mother, sensing his melancholy, asks him if he wouldn’t want to join her and Lewis at the movies. Hal follows his parents to the Bijou out of habit rather than any desire to shake himself out of his rut. He’s been sitting between them for forty minutes, his eyes on the screen and his mind somewhere back in that ice cream shop, when a strangely familiar laugh slices through the dark room.

“Sssh!” someone scolds a few rows ahead of them, and Hal squints against the theatre dark to where popcorn keeps spraying up into the base of the picture. There’s a rowdy pair of kids in the very front row, feet up on the metal bar dividing them from the screen, chattering and snorting laughter like they’re alone. Hal hears his mother sniff disapprovingly next to him and feels a prickle of annoyance directed at the pair – not for interrupting the movie, as he hadn’t really been watching, but for being friends when he has none.

One of the boys turns to whisper in the ear of the other one, and Hal’s stomach gives a jolt as the screen light falls upon his profile. It’s FP. Again. And the other boy, the one who had laughed -

Hal’s once-best-friend, Fred Andrews. 

Hal looks quickly back to the screen, staring hard at the very centre of the picture. Superstitiously, he feels as though if he doesn’t look at them, they cannot possibly notice him.

Yet his eyes keep sliding back to the utter normalcy of them– the easy, joyful, unselfconscious way they live. Hal hates sitting in the front row, but abruptly he would have given anything to join them – to be one of those boys who sat with a neck ache tossing popcorn and swigging cola and being egged on by friends who cared enough to egg him on. His stomach twists in a way that has nothing to do with the diet coke he’s been swallowing.

And for someone whose thighs are pressing painfully against each side of the narrow theatre seat, he’s never felt smaller.

* * *

 

Hal’s in the back room on Monday, the closed door sealing out the sound of Nick and Noelle chattering with Alice about whatever she’d done on her weekend. He’s patiently unstacking boxes of supplies onto the shelves, rearranging the products so that the oldest ones are at the front. It’s a care that Nick never takes, Noelle always complains, which is why Hal, she says, is the best employee they’ve ever had.

A fat lot of good that was doing him. But at least he could help. 

He’s carrying the cardboard to the recycling when he first notices the yelling. Through the teal-painted wall, he can hear raised voices issuing from the front of the store. Hal pauses, feeling nervous. Suppose they’re being robbed, and he doesn’t know because he’s squished in the back room? Suppose he should be running out the back and calling the police?

Pushing the inside door open a crack allows him to see into the pink front of the shop. His eye is drawn immediately to Alice’s gold hair, standing with her back to him behind the counter. Nick and Noelle are on either side of her, radiating an uncharacteristic tension. The source of the yelling is a man he doesn’t recognize - medium-height and belligerent, eyes narrowed in anger and a spill of five-o-clock stubble running down his chin into the unbuttoned collar of his shirt. He’s glaring at Alice, a finger jabbing at her across the counter.  

“Just tell me where the fuck the money is, Ally-!” The man is yelling. 

Alice is fighting back, energy crackling from her. “It’s my money, dad!”

The man explodes. “Bull- _shit_ it’s your money! Fuck you, you little whore! What the hell do you need the money for anyway? You think you’re going to school is that it? You think any school would let in a trailer trash little bitch like you?”

The connecting door closes with a sharp bang behind him before Hal’s even aware of having moved. He walks quickly toward Alice across the tile, his pulse pounding in his ears. His only thought is getting to her as quickly as possible, slipping his arms around her and shielding her with as much of his body as he could. He squeezes himself next to her and she leans back against his arm, the hot press of her body steeling his nerves so that he forgets to be afraid, or even embarrassed. Hal rubs Alice’s arm comfortingly. The muscles are tense and trembling under her skin.

“You’re out of line.” Nick’s voice has danger in it. “Sir, if you don’t leave right now-

“Fuck you.” The man has very cold eyes. He laughs at the expression on Nick’s face. “She told you where she’s from, right? She told you where she used to work?” His cold blue eyes slide back to Hal and Alice. “You told them, right, Ally?”

“Go away!” Alice screams. Hal squeezes her arm.

“Nice shop like this.” Alice’s father is backing up, arms spread wide, the reek of liquor off his clothes mingling with the sugar smell. “You should have her dance for you. You’d make more money if she danced for you.”

“GO AWAY!” Alice suddenly yanks out of Hal’s grip and flies toward the counter, a streak of clenched fists and blonde hair and tears. Nick has to grab her around the middle to intercept her, and she strains against his arm, sobbing. “WHY WON’T YOU GO AWAY!”

“Sir, I’ve already called the police.” Noelle steps in front of Alice and Nick. “They’re on their way.”

“Fuck you, bitch.”

Hal almost slaps him. In an abrupt movement, the man plunges his hand into the ceramic dolphin-shaped dish of spare change that Noelle keeps on the counter, emptying its contents over the sides. Pennies spill frantically over the counter and the floor in a deafening cacophony. Rodger Smith backs up, coat hanging open around his thin frame. None of the coins seem to stay in his hand, falling from his closed grip to hit the tile like artillery shells. He sneers at them all before slamming through the front door and out onto the street. The OPEN sign thumps against the glass, one of the chains snapping, and drops to the floor.

In the stunned silence that follows, Alice’s crying is the only sound. Then Noelle turns to her, enveloping her in a tight hug. 

“Oh, honey,” Hal hears her murmur. His hands are shaking, and he slips them in the pockets of his apron and balls them into fists.

“My dad-” Alice chokes out, and Hal’s stomach turns over. “My _dad_. I’m sorry.”

“Alice,” Nick is saying, low and reassuring. “Alice, it’s all right.” 

The ringing in Hal’s ears overwhelms the rest of it. Feeling obtrusively like he’s taking up space behind the counter, he walks as if in a trance around to the front of the store. The coin dish is nearly empty, but undamaged. Holding it just under the lip of the counter, Hal slowly sweeps money back into it. When he’s returned it all to the bowl, he crouches down on the tile to gather that which had hit the floor.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Alice is saying sharply. Hal pauses in the act of gathering pennies, crouched on his hands and knees. He can hear Alice gathering her things, Noelle’s low voice, asking if Alice has somewhere to go.

“I’m going to my mom’s,” she replies.

“Let Hal walk you there.”

“No.” Her voice is hoarse, but strong. “I want to be alone.”

Hal stays on his hands and knees, quietly transferring pennies into the bowl. Alice walks past him without a backward glance, her Doc Martens clomping loudly on the tile, the untied strings of her apron still dangling almost to the ground.  

“Hal?” Noelle asks once the door has closed. Hal straightens up, placing the dish back on the counter. Noelle glances meaningfully at the door.

“Would you walk her home?”

There’s something swelling in his chest that he can’t define. With a nod to the shop owner, he breathes in and uncurls the fists in his apron pockets. Wipes them neatly on his pants.

“Let us know she’s okay,” says Nick, his face and Noelle’s twin masks of worry. “Please.”

“Make sure she knows we’re not mad at her,” Noelle chimes in.

“I will,” says Hal seriously, turning to the door, where a few thin rays of afternoon light are making rainbows in the glass. He doesn’t’ hesitate before shoving through them, a steamy rush of hot summer air hitting his face and breaking through the comforting ice cream cool of the shop. 

* * *

He catches up to her on the street outside the park, walking hard and fast in the vague direction of Hal and Fred’s neighbourhood. Her hands are balled into fists, swinging back and forth as she walks as though she might hit someone. Hal walks quicker, trying to close the distance between them, but every time he gets close enough to touch her she puts on an unexpected burst of speed.

“Alice--” he calls out as she races away from him down the path. “Alice, wait.”

“What do you want?”

“Alice—” Hal gasps. There’s a stitch in his chest that feels like a stab wound, and he’s almost panting from the effort of keeping pace with her. “Can you slow down? Please?”

“Why should I? So you can laugh in my face?

“I wouldn’t-” His knees feel like they’re about to give in. “Can you please wait up?”

“Well now you know!” she screams without stopping, turning to face him in one sharp jolt so that her butterscotch hair flies in a tangle over her face. She keeps walking backward, almost as quickly as before. “Now you know the truth! Where I’m from! Who my dad is! Why I’m never going to college!” 

“Alice, please.” Hal slows to a stop at last, leaning over with his hands on his thighs. “I don’t have my inhaler.” 

She stops and stands regarding him with her arms folded in displeasure. Hal glances up and meets her eyes, wide and blue and frightened in her sun-freckled face. He takes a step toward her and is reassured when she doesn’t run away.

Yesterday this would have been the part where he faltered. Where he got tongue-tied and didn’t know what to say. But something about the scene in the ice cream shop had put everything straight in his head, until the words come without effort.

“Alice, what your dad said, it wasn’t true. Any of it.” Hal tries for an encouraging smile, but he’s so winded that it comes out a grimace. “Least of all that you’re never going to college.” 

“It is true.” Her eyes are sparkly, her mouth barely moving. “All of it. I worked at the bar. I live on the Southside. I run with a gang. I took my clothes off for a room of middle-aged men I hardly knew.” She looks away, up into the waving trees. “I’m never going to college.” There are tears in her eyes. “That’s the real me.” 

Maybe it’s the lack of oxygen, but Hal feels weightless. His hands shake and his heart throbs and he knows beyond knowing that he loves her. Loves her with the worst kind of melancholy, because he knows it isn’t returned; loves her with the worse kind of heartache, because he can feel her suffering.

“No, it’s not, Alice, listen to me.” He straightens up, still breathing hard. “I think you’re great. Nothing he said changes that. Hell, Alice, I knew you were from the Southside. I don’t care. Neither would Nick and Noelle. They love everyone.” 

“You knew?” Her eyes flash, and he thinks for a moment he might get slugged. If he was Fred, she would have hit him. “You’re saying I admitted all that for nothing?” 

Hal shakes his head. “I mean, not – not everything. But I knew you lived over on that side of town. Since you’re dating FP and all –“

“Dating FP!” she shrieks, her face suddenly turning bright red. The wind whips the sunlit branches over their heads so that they flurry against each other. “Dating FP!?"

“Well, aren’t you?” Hal asks miserably, his love for her spilling up into his throat until he can hardly swallow. He can feel his face going pink and knows it isn’t from the sun. “He kissed you at the party.”

“Oh, fuck.” Alice buries her face in her hands. “That’s what you think.”

“Alice.” Hal feels a tickle of annoyance for the first time, a gnawing uncertainty in him that almost dares to be hope. “Aren’t you---“

“Maybe I’m not!” she screams, lifting her face from her palms. “Maybe I’m not, okay? Maybe I’m pretending! But why would you know?!”

Hal blinks, caught off guard. “How do you _pretend_ to date FP? Why do you pretend to date FP?”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Alice turns away. “Hal, just leave me alone.”

“Where are you going?” Hal slides his hands in his pockets again, which throb from wanting to hold her. The skin of his palms is cold in her absence. “You told Noelle you were going to your mom’s.”

“So I lied. Can you blame me?” She scrubs her eyes with the heels of her hands and he’s struck by how beautiful she is, even red-faced and puffy-eyed. He notices the ghost of that bruise on her jaw, and his stomach clenches tight. “They’re never going to want me back. I should have left this fucking apron.”

Hal thinks about knots. How you can tie something up nice and strong. Two halves of a something, if you’re good.

He wishes it worked that way with people. 

“Alice, they know it’s not your fault.”

She purses her lips, glaring at the ground. “Maybe it’s not what it looks like.”

“Sorry?”

“Me and FP.” Alice looks up at him, her voice finally softening to its normal tone. “Maybe FP likes someone else, but we have to pretend to be a couple sometimes. Okay? And maybe he kissed me at that party because he’s my friend. And I pretend to be with him because I’m his.”

“I still don’t understand –“

But Alice ignores him. “Because maybe—” She’s starting to cry now, both fists clenched so tight they shake, and the bottom drops out of his stomach like an elevator going down. Her voice wavers. “Maybe the people you’re supposed to be with never like you back that way.” 

“Alice—“

“It’s not fair,” she sobs, tears running down her blotchy cheeks, and still his hands throb with emptiness, still he longs to pull her in and hold her – her hair under his cheek, her clenched fists pillowed against his chest. “It’s not fair because now I don’t want to pretend, but it’s all ruined and now you know the truth, and Hal – I can’t even tell you how much I wanted to kiss you.”

The world stops. 

Hal’s nearest frame of reference is the feeling of going over the highest drop on a roller coaster, a weightless, heart-in-your-throat feeling like she’s pushed him off a cliff. The other part of him wants to laugh. Hal Cooper. Boring and safe and who took up far too much space in the universe. And then Alice and her clear skin and her butterscotch hair and her crooked eyeliner, who could have had the pick of all the boys in the world. Wanted to kiss him. The burning in his chest is something like melted gold. He has a flash of the irrational thought that this must be what it feels to be Fred Andrews, all of the time. Always on fire. Always wanting more.

“But fine, you’re right.” She’s wiping tears from her eyes. “Let it be FP. I’ll marry him and we’ll have six kids in a trailer somewhere and he’ll get drunk just like his dad and I’ll yell at him just like my dad and it’s all laid out for us because that’s all I’ll ever be.” She presses her hands into her face. “Trailer trash,” she whispers toward the sky. “Southside trailer trash. That’s all.”

“No,” says Hal, before he even realizes he’s spoken. Emboldened, burning, some ghost of Fred in his speech – or maybe it’s just him, a more confident version of himself that he’s never known before – he takes a step toward her and catches her face in both of his hands. Hal gently moves his thumb across the tear tracks on her skin, dragging them down over her cheeks and away. He speaks softly to her as he does.

“Hey. I don’t care where you’re from. It doesn’t make a difference to me.” Her eyes flicker to his lips and his heart skips ten beats. “Alice, you’re wonderful. You’re so wonderful and it has nothing to do with where you’re from or where you were brought up, you just are. And you say you don’t deserve anything good – that’s just not true. That’s not true at all.”

“Hal.” She lets out a wet, choking laugh, baring her crooked, lipstick-stained teeth in a smile. “You deserve better than me.”

“They don’t come better than you.” 

She hugs him so abruptly that he doesn’t have time to tense up. His senses are overwhelmed by her again – her gold hair in his mouth, both of her hands landing on his upper back and gripping fistfuls of the fat that rolled there. Ordinarily, he’d recoil apologetically at the gesture, put what had always felt like mandatory distance between the places where they’re pressed skin-to-skin. But today his hands had gone instinctively around her and the intoxicating warmth of the bare skin in the middle of her back had silenced those thoughts as if for good. The hug lasts and lasts and Hal feels dizzy and special and light. His last coherent thought is a semi-religious prayer, his eyes squeezed shut into the warmth of Alice’s embrace -

_Dear God, please don’t take this away from me._

It’s Alice who pulls back first, her golden mane of hair spilling backward off her shoulders when she looks up so that the ends brush magically over the skin of Hal’s wrists. “Walk me to Fred’s house?” she asks hopefully, all trace of tears gone.

Hal could no longer say no to anything in the world. “Of course.”

A group of kids is playing kickball in the field closest to them, their merry shouts and the periodic slap of foot on leather filling the summer air with noise. Hal hears it as if for the first time as they begin to walk down the path, not just background, but the bright, glittering hopefulness of the season. Three girls stream single-file past them on bikes, streamers fluttering from their handlebars. They ring their tinny bells impatiently as they zip around him, and for the first time Hal understands that it’s not because he’s taking up too much of the sidewalk on his own, but because he’s walking with another person.  

They’ve fallen into step as easily as old friends. Alice wipes her nose discreetly on her hand.

“I can’t tell you why I’m pretending with FP. I’m sorry. Just promise you’ll keep the secret.”

“I promise.” Hal stuffs his hands in his pockets and keeps walking, keeping a quiet inventory of the secrets he has rattling inside him. Fred’s. Alice’s. “I guess—“ He pauses, but pushes on. “I guess I just wish you were pretending to date me instead.”

“I don’t.”

Hal’s heart sinks a little. “Yeah?”

Alice has stopped short on the sidewalk, tugging him to a halt with one hand wrapped around his wrist. “Because I don’t want it to be pretend.”

And then she’s risen up on her toes and she’s kissing him and nothing – not the hug, not the confession, not any of Fred’s million helpful articles from Seventeen magazine and patient, emphatic descriptions of the virtues of winning the top lip – could have prepared him for this moment. Alice has his bottom lip trapped between her own, pressing against his mouth with a warm, soft, gentle kiss that tastes like heat and honey. Hal’s head buzzes with the same feeling as a sugar rush, and blood pounds dizzyingly in his temples. His stomach feels like it’s been wrung inside-out. 

He has a terrifying, heart-fluttering moment where he has no idea where to put his hands, and then they find the denim-covered edges of her hipbones and rest there as gently as butterflies, hooking one thumb into a belt loop – thank you, Fred – and holding her just a little closer. The kiss is butterscotch sweet and vanilla bean smooth and better than any ice cream flavour in the whole wide world. The thought _I’m kissing Alice Smith_ seems too large and too impossible to ever comprehend so he settles for details – the way she smells faintly like ice cream, the nudge of her bare shins against his clothed legs, the imprint of her lithe body against his soft chest and how it no longer bothers him.

Their lips pull apart and her face is larger in his vision than he’s ever seen – he’s privy at last to the green-gray shimmer in the depths of her eyes, the little sky-coloured flecks in them. Her lipstick is smeared a little off her top lip and he wants to kiss it to fix it for her. She bites her lip but doesn’t move to kiss him again. She’s waiting for him, he realizes, and the thought gives him a scary, intoxicating rush, sweeter than caramel. He remembers and regrets his braces a moment too late, but they didn’t seem to have been a problem, so he pushes the thought away.

His hands leave her hips and comb luxuriously through her tangled mess of hair, adoring the way her messy curls tumble over and around his hands. And then he takes the plunge and does it- leans in and presses his lips against hers again, and Alice slides her tongue just a little past the rim of his bottom lip to kiss him properly, and oh God, Fred was right.

It’s better than anything.


	11. FP

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His world is in turmoil after the kiss, an upside-down, off-kilter approximation of what had once been. The summer feels different somehow, electric yet confusing, frightening and strange.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i really wanted to do the next chapter of bttf by halloween but this was all i had the mental energy for so please take this short stressful chapter

“It’s just a complicated thing,” says Alice, hesitating when Hal asks her the next day if she’s still pretending to date FP Jones. “Of course I’m going to break up with him, though-” she snorts, “breakup isn’t the right word. Just give me time to do it.” She squeezes his arm, a gesture which makes his legs turn to mush. “It’s sensitive.”

Hal has never thought of FP as anything remotely resembling sensitive before, but he would do anything for Alice Smith, and doesn’t disagree.

His world is in turmoil after the kiss, an upside-down, off-kilter approximation of what had once been. The summer feels different somehow, electric yet confusing, frightening and strange. Alongside the great burst of confidence in him, he finds himself equally longing for the familiar – distressed by his sister’s intruding independence, his mother’s new habit of scheduling bridge games and book club meetings up until the beginning of their family dinners. Everyone seems to be rushing headlong into new lives as July winds down, and much as Hal is cheered by finally reaching what seems to be a remarkably late developmental milestone, the winds of change frighten him.  

If Alice breaks up with FP, then that implies it will be his time to take his place as her boyfriend, and Hal – even after years of having Gertrude and Fred to study – has yet to learn or understand what a boyfriend does. He’s anxious about a whole number of things, not least of them his kissing ability. And a larger, darker worry keeps looming up in his thoughts – the memory of Alice’s father, his open coat and beer-drenched stubble, all the things Fred had never told him about her home life, the stark nuances of her admission, the awfulness of her youth.  

He needs to talk to Fred about it. He _wants_ to talk to Fred, because he hasn’t seen him properly since their sleepover, and there’s a small ache in him when he thinks of their lost friendship. So Hal finds himself on his day off biking down the tree-lined roads toward the Andrews house, feeling secure for the first time in days with the promise of his friend’s company.

The door of the white house is unlocked and ajar, yet Hal hesitates on the doorstep, wondering if he shouldn’t just politely tug it shut. He knows Fred is home –the sound of a popular rock station drifting from the open upstairs windows tells him that much - and he’d seen Mrs. Andrews’ car headed in the direction of the supermarket on his way over. Still, his mother’s words whisper in his ear, warning of the indiscretion of letting yourself into a place without permission. Of course, Fred couldn’t hear the doorbell with the radio that loud.

Still, how often had Fred freely invited himself into Hal’s house? It was the sort of thing you did in the summer – raced barefoot in and out of houses as though they were temporary structures, minor pit-stops on the way to the treehouse or the pool. Maybe Hal could be that kind of spontaneous for once – could at least play pretend with the kid of unselfconsciousness that Fred thrived on. Maybe they could have two glasses of lemonade, sit on the porch, be best friends like old times.  

The radio is blaring. Hal enters the house and walks slowly up the stairs, expecting to find Fred drumming out an air-drum solo at his desk. The bedroom door is ajar and he pushes it further open. And freezes.

Fred and FP are on the bed, both of them half-naked, kissing as though they’re the only two people left in the world. Kissing the way people only kiss in movies. Once the freezing dunk of initial shock passes, it will occur to him how touching the kiss had been – the love in it, the way it was like every scene in every movie, the way even Hal’s parents didn’t kiss anymore.

But at the moment Hal’s head floods with memory. Greendale, 1984. Words he was too young to know – hate crime, homophobia, sexually motivated, sin. His father silent and uncomfortable at the breakfast table, his mother pursing her lips and saying they shouldn’t talk about it; the way she did when other people’s lives fell apart. The newspaper headline they didn’t let him look at.

He must have gasped, or made some noise, because they both seem to notice him at once. For the panicked moment that Hal meets eyes with Fred, it feels like looking at a stranger. Then FP all but smacks Fred off of him and tears himself off the bed, a string of curses exploding from his lips as he wrestles his pants back up onto his hips:

“Fuck, FUCK – FUCK!” FP’s alternating between glaring at Hal and glaring frantically around the room as though Hal had brought half the town in with him. “FUCK!” he spits at Fred as he buttons his jeans, the word laced in the worst kind of venom, and Fred’s hands go up, formed to cradle, as if to soothe him. 

Only FP is beyond soothing. The mattress thuds as he leaps off of it, and the sight of FP running toward him with murder in his eyes and his pants half sliding off his hips is enough to override every thought in Hal’s brain and replace them with the signal to RUN. He sprints back into the hall with FP hot on his heels, making it as far as the staircase before FP’s tight grip closes on his shoulders, yanking him to a halt.

“YOU—“ FP is incoherent in his rage, spitting as he spins Hal around, shoves him back until he hits wall. And then Fred’s there, slipping effortlessly halfway between them, hands up in front of FP like he’s corralling a wild animal.

“He won’t say anything!” Fred is yelling at FP, breathless, throwing one hand out behind him to stop Hal from moving. Fred stands between the two boys with his arms extended, keeping them apart. His chest is heaving. “He won’t say anything!”

Hal leans against the wall, breathing hard, his mind stuck. Fred turns to Hal, his eyes frantic and desperate. “You won’t say anything.” His voice trembles. “Will you, Hal?” 

Hal shakes his head like a puppet on a string. “No,” he manages. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

He stares at FP – eyes red and flooded, veins popping out on his neck – and doesn’t envy him anymore. Not even a little. Not at all.

“FUCK!” FP gasps one last time, and drags a hand down over his face, obscuring what might be tears. “He’d better not. You –” He jabs a finger toward Hal, the nail pointed at his throat. “You don’t say a _fucking_ word- or else-“  

His voice breaks off into what might have been a croaky sob. Prudence’s voice echoes in Hal’s head, telling him it’s rude to stare. He knows he’s gaping at FP like a fish out of water.

“F-“ and Hal’s never heard that tenderness in Fred’s voice before, not ever, “-he won’t tell.” His gentle fingers wrap carefully around FP’s bicep, pressing in. “We can trust him.” 

“I won’t tell anyone,” Hal babbles frantically, pinned like a butterfly under FP’s fearsome glare. “I really won’t. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I – the door was open and I didn’t mean to, but I don’t have anyone to tell-”

“Go, Hal,” says Fred, whose chest is bare: the narrow staircase of his ribs visible above his flat, suntanned stomach. The zipper of his jeans is down. His eyes are looking anywhere but Hal’s face, sliding over him to come to a stop at the wall behind his head. There’s a coldness in his voice that’s new to it. “Can you just go?”

Tears running down his cheeks, not sure what on earth he’s crying for, Hal complies.


	12. Summer's End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is supposed to be the happy ending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the Hal that wasn't in the flashback episode

**August.**

This is supposed to be the happy ending.

The last month of summer is upon Riverdale now, as orange-full and hot as a ball of dripping wax. Sweat stains the armpits of Hal’s short-sleeved shirts and gathers at the nape of his neck when he walks home from work. Alice ends her pretend relationship with FP, arriving at the Dream Cream one Wednesday in a thundercloud mood and clomping around in her Doc Martens, cursing FP’s name at every opportunity. But the mood has abated by the end of her shift, where she squeezes Hal’s hand and kisses him softly before slipping out the door. Hal holds the kiss to his lips with his fingers all the way home, revelling in an astonished way in his newfound propriety over that particular taste of her lipstick.

It is as though he has skipped several pages in the slowly unfolding novel of his adolescence, and is now tearing up track that he used to be overtaking at a dull plod. The encroaching beginning of his sophomore year no longer terrifies him – instead, he finds himself looking forward to the startlingly near date he will be dragged to the dentist to have his braces off. His mother permits him for the first time to go to the barbershop for a haircut rather than enduring her blue smock and kitchen stool, and for the first time in a long time, Hal surveys his reflection in his bedroom mirror with something like hope.

There is a long list of firsts. The afternoon in the aggressively air-conditioned theatre where he had once sat between his parents, his thumb resting lightly on the golden curve of Alice’s inner thigh as she laughs too loudly at a screwball comedy he would never have picked himself. Hal is so intoxicated by the touch that he finishes the movie with his popcorn over half full. Then there’s the time she tells Nick they’re _dating_ , the word so strange and absurd to his ears that he almost misses it. The kisses, each one more wonderful, and the day he’s bold enough to settle a hand against the hem of her short tank top and slide it slowly up along her skin until it brushes the rough lace of her bra.

For awhile he holds his breath in wait, assuming the other shoe will drop – yet FP does not reappear, and Alice does not tire of him. Hal fears seeing FP at all again, assuming the other boy would murder him on sight if they were alone together, but as August turns hotter neither he nor Fred are anywhere to be found. Hal misses Fred dreadfully, even on the best days with Alice - his absence is bittersweet and painful, a sour note in the cotton-candy sweetness of his summer love. Even when he had believed he was losing Fred’s friendship to FP, he had not fully anticipated the heart-chilling coldness of the day they would finally cease to be friends.

Yet sweet the days remain. Lewis remarks that Hal seems to be enjoying his summer job altogether _too_ much -  there are days when he’s up and dressed hours in advance, awkwardly pacing in the front hall in his uniform until it’s an acceptable time to leave. There’s something special and bright between himself and Alice at the shop, where they work as though they have been co-workers all their lives. His time with her is heaven, and Hal understands at last- perhaps too late – what it was that had led Fred to that cornfield, stars in his eyes, one damp, anxious hand tucked in the belt loop of someone’s corduroy skirt. 

Days off, when Hal’s mother monopolizes his time, become unbearable by contrast. The small rituals of grocery shopping, optometry appointments, and back to school sales are suddenly agonizing. They swallow the time in which he could be by Alice’s side, could be playing with her butterscotch hair or breathing in the checkout-line perfume she sprayed on her neck to keep it smelling like cherries. When he’s with Alice he tangles his fingers in her multitude of necklaces without fearing they’re too large and too wide, lets her feed him sweet mouthfuls of every new flavour that comes in the store without questioning the calorie count. With his mother in a department store, her thin hand wrapped around his wrist to keep him from straying, he feels again as though he’s five years old and too big for himself, the object of every passer-by’s curious glances. 

Or maybe it’s just the lighting in this fitting room.

“I don’t want a new swimsuit!” Hal yells through the flimsy door of the corner stall where he’s spent the last forty-five minutes. He swallows a lump in his throat, worried the tears he feels building in his face might leak into his voice. “I’m not going to go swimming. I don’t need one.”

Prudence raps neatly on the other side of the door, her voice impatient. “Can I come in?”

“No!” Hal folds his arms over his bare chest, turning his back with relief on the unforgiving mirror that dominates the far wall. “This one doesn’t fit.”

“Why don’t you come out, then?” 

“I said it doesn’t fit, mom!”

Prudence sucks in her breath, annoyed. Hal squeezes his arms tighter around himself, unsure if it’s for warmth or for comfort. He’s kept them both here too long, fighting his way into swimsuit after swimsuit that makes him look ridiculous. Between the florescent lights, the peeling white walls, and the irritating noise of other shoppers, the place seems as joyless and misery-inducing as any prison cell.

His voice wavers, plaintive. “Can we just go home?”

“Why don’t you try this one.” Another swimsuit appears over the top of his fitting room door, the rustle of fabric and clank of the metal hanger unbearable to his ears. “It has a pocket.”

“I don’t want a pocket! What am I going to put in a pocket in the pool!”

“I don’t like your tone, Harold.” His mother sounds annoyed, probably because she hasn’t seen his face for nearly an hour. “Open this door right now.”

Hal yanks the swimsuit off the top of the door and tosses it in a corner. He wrestles the one he’s wearing down his legs with effort – it’s tight over his thighs – and pulls his jeans back on, feeling as chastised and stupid as a little kid. He opens the door a crack, holding it tight so his mother can’t wrench it further open. “I’m sorry.” His voice is small. “I don’t like any of them.”

His mother’s reasoning for torturing him was that the end-of-summer sales was a terrific time for Hal to finally buy the swimsuit he’d been going without. Immovable when she had her mind on something, Prudence had somehow piloted him out the door and into the Cooper minivan, and from there to the Riverdale mall and into his worst nightmare. She’d stacked their cart with swimsuits from the unbearably named HUSKY section, and yet none of them fit. Hal hates their blue tags with a passion and wishes they had gone anywhere else, though he had no knowledge of the stores in the mall apart from the food court.

Hal had never laid foot inside one of the brightly-coloured shops meant for boys his age, usually with skateboards displayed in the window or pictures of men with washboard abs. So through every fault of his own, it’s this department store on the top floor where he’s suffering, his face burning hot and embarrassed even as the temperature in the change room is frigid cold.

“Did you try the one with the pocket?”

“No,” says Hal grouchily. “Fine. But it won’t fit.”

Before his mother can speak, he bangs the door closed again.

It’s stupid. It’s stupid because it doesn’t matter, because no matter what they buy he’s going to banish it to his bottom dresser drawer and never go swimming in it anyway. It’s stupid because Alice doesn’t care what he looks like, because he’s never going to be thin or look like an advertisement, because he shouldn’t be surprised that after a summer of no exercise and no diet change his body looks the same as it’s always been. Yet somehow he’d hoped that the sight of himself half-dressed wouldn’t make him want to cry, if anything.

He puts on the last swimsuit and ties the drawstring, swallowing hard and putting on the kind of brave face usually reserved for young children about to get a needle. He turns to the mirror, teeth gritted, and thinks maybe, maybe, maybe it isn’t that bad. In fact, maybe it’s okay.

A slow, soft bubble of hope begins to rise in his chest as he looks at his reflection. The swimsuit covers enough of his thigh that it doesn’t bother him, and the waistband hits in a way that minimizes the damage. It’s comfortable. The colour is fine. And he kind of likes the way it looks. 

He pushes the door of the fitting room cautiously outward, trying to decide if he would have the courage to wear this in front of Alice. It’s hard to say. Prudence stares at him for a moment and then turns busily back to their shopping cart. 

“Oh, it doesn’t suit you, honey, you were right. Try this one.”

A blue swimsuit is shoved at him with a rattle, Prudence’s purse slipping down her arm on its leather straps to bang against her other shopping bags. Hal, his heart sore and smarting for reasons he’d never admit to himself, bites his tongue so he won’t burst into tears and slams the changeroom door in her face.

“Hal!” his mother exclaims, tapping sharply on the door. “Hal, if that’s the one you want we can buy it, for heaven’s sake.”

Hal sits down hard in a corner of the impossibly cold stall, drawing his feet up and off the dirty floor. He glares at the flat plane of the dressing room door, picturing his mother behind it. “I told you I didn’t want a swimsuit. Can we please go home now?”

His mother sighs, one of her great eye-rolling ones, he can tell. “This is what I get for trying to help!”

“Go away!” Hal yells back through the door, no longer caring about being rude, or making himself a spectacle of himself in front of the other half dozen teenagers dragged there by their mothers. “Can’t you just go away for a bit!”

She does, finally, though it takes a long time for her sensibly-heeled feet to withdraw from under the crack of the door and her impatient tapping to die down from the other side of the plaster. Hal sniffles miserably into his hand, gathering himself for a moment before he starts gathering his clothes, pulling his shirt back on first. He’s already regretting yelling. This whole thing was out of control, and he wants to go home and forget it. Slim chance of that when his mother was probably gearing up for a long lecture on the car ride home. 

He cracks the door of the change room open, peeking out to see if his mother is still around, if she’d only withdrawn as far as the three uncomfortable chairs by the returns desk. No, Prudence is nowhere in sight. Probably at the food court, bickering with the teenage cashier about the price of a cup of tea. With a frustrated sigh, Hal shoves the door open wider, only to be suddenly met with resistance when it collides with another body. The victim yelps in surprise, and Hal’s face turns beet red.

“I’m sorry! I’m so sor-” He freezes when he turns the corner of the door and realizes he’d banged into none other than Fred Andrews. Fred’s eyes get huge, and Hal can feel even more blood flooding into his face. _Fuck._  

“Hi Hal,” says Fred, blushing. He’s dressed in jeans and a new shirt, the tag sticking out at an adorably comical angle from his neck. Fred’s always been easy to read – his emotions are always plain as day on his features, and Hal knows just by looking at his expression that Fred had indeed been avoiding him since that day in July. He’s keeping his words neutral, but guilt is flickering in the depths of his brown eyes. “Cool swimsuit.”

“Cool shirt,” says Hal automatically, his voice shy – it’s a black T-shirt with some scribbled red writing on the front that looks like it spells out SLASHER or SLAYER or some equally violent noun. Fred pulls at the hem of it, stretching it out.

“I thought it was cool,” he says, which Hal translates effortlessly to _FP would think it was cool._ They’ve been friends for a long time.

“I’m here with my mom,” Hal babbles, trying to commiserate with his friend at the same time as he tries to defend himself. “She dragged me here. I didn’t want to come, but I didn’t have anything else to do.” His eyes flicker toward the mirror at the end of the hall, and his heart wrenches abruptly at the sight of their shared reflection. It looks so normal, seeing them there together – Hal chubby and blond and Fred small and brunette. Like it had always been, since they were kids.

“Hal?”

Fred had been speaking. Hal turns back to him. “Sorry?”

“I said are you going to buy the swimsuit?”

“No.” Hal tries to laugh, but it comes out hoarse. “I look stupid.”

Fred furrows his brow, and maybe Hal just hasn’t seen him for a long time, but he looks different. Older already. “You look fine,” he argues, folding his arms.

Hal deflates. “That’s ‘because I have my shirt on.”

“You can always wear a shirt to go swimming in, you know.”

“Oh.” Hal feels stupid for never having thought of that, if only on his worst days at the town pool. “It’s not uncool?”

Fred shrugs, turning to the mirror. “Nah, that’s what FP does. He burns easily.”

No sooner has the phrase left Fred’s lips than Hal watches him freeze. He feels the memory of that day tighten the air, realizing as Fred does that saying FP’s name has involuntarily brought forward the reason that they were no longer close. Hal makes himself speak, his armpits damp, his chest very tense.

“Fred, you and FP –” Fred’s eyes slide to his in the mirror, and Hal forces himself to relax. Fred is tense enough for both of them. “I think it’s cool. And I’m not going to tell anyone.”

Fred nods, and swallows, and then suddenly Hal’s having the breath shoved out of him as Fred runs into him and hugs him tight - his arms around him and his hair in his mouth and the store shirt smelling starchy and new, his grip almost crushing Hal’s ribcage with the force of it, slim as he was. Hal hugs him back, one tight squeeze, and then Fred’s pulling back out of his arms and smiling, turning to look at the two of them in the mirror and somehow their friendship is real again, as easy as that.

Hal’s throat is tight as the Fred reflected in the mirror slides an arm around him. They look suddenly like every photo of them from every birthday party they’ve ever had. Friends. Maybe even best friends. He finds himself automatically comparing their reflections until Fred speaks, and Hal realizes he’s doing the same.   

“You’re lucky,” says Fred enviously. “You have shoulders and muscles and- everything. I look like I’m still twelve.”

“But you’re skinny,” says Hal automatically, surprised. “I’m huge.”

“You’re not huge. And even if you were, who cares? It’s better than being too skinny.”

“It’s better to be too skinny than too fat any day.”

“Not the way Hermione talks about it,” replies Fred mournfully. “She says I’m too skinny to date her.”

“What about Zelda?” 

Fred is leaning forward until his head almost skims the mirror, critically examining his reflection. “Who?”

Hal almost laughs. Fred pouts.

“Your hair looks so cool too. And I want to be taller. Can I touch your arm?” he asks, and then abruptly squeezes Hal’s bicep. Fred lets out a moan. “I want muscles.” 

“I barely have muscles.” 

“But look at this!” Fred whacks Hal across the chest with his arm. “My arms are like noodles!”

Hal does laugh, because the way Fred’s holding his arm it’s as floppy as spaghetti. “You’ll get muscles.”

“I want them now. You think anyone on the basketball team is going to take me seriously?” Fred’s all hopped up now, revving up into his usual energetic self. “I want to play post! I want to be tall! I look like a doofus!”

He grabs a random white T-shirt off a hook and throws it at Hal’s head. “Here’s a shirt. Buy it and get the swimsuit and we can finally go swimming.” 

“Fred-” Hal blurts out, holding the shirt, because suddenly if he keeps the secret anymore it’ll kill him. “Alice and I are girlfriend and boyfriend.”

Fred goes uncharacteristically still, his eyes huge. “Whoa.” 

Hal grins. "Yeah.”

Fred’s mouth is agape. “Well you can’t just say that!” he cries when Hal doesn’t speak. “Don’t leave me in suspense! You know Alice is like, a crazy person, right? Like, she’s _actually_ crazy.” 

For just a moment, Hal remembers Alexander Cabot the third. His smile grows wider.

“Maybe I like crazy.”

Fred hoots. “Hal Cooper, I knew you were a crazy man!” He leaps back into his change room and jumps into his jeans, buttoning them easily at the waist. The SLAYER shirt comes off over his head, replaced with a worn-out baseball tee.

“Fred?” Hal asks.

He pauses for a long time, trying to gather the words _. Thanks for being my friend_ , he wants to say. Or, _I think you look perfect. I think you are perfect._

“I like that shirt,” he manages finally.

“Good. I’ll get it.” Fred thumps back into the changeroom, whisking his rejects off the top of the door. “You should get that swimsuit.” 

The door of Fred’s room bangs shut, and then suddenly flies open. Fred’s standing there, one shoe in his hand. 

“What?” asks Hal. 

“Come to my birthday party.” Fred blushes. “I didn’t send you an invitation. I didn’t know if we were fighting or what.”

Hal feels his face redden, uncertain of how far his newfound confidence reaches. “Is there drinking?”

Fred cracks a huge grin. “Nah, we’re going to a water park. So get the swimsuit. And I’ll tell Alice she has to come.”

He closes the door again, and Hal glances back at the mirror, his reflection alone. The three chairs behind them are empty – his mother still hasn’t returned. Hal waits patiently until Fred steps back out, his baseball cap jammed backward on his head.

“What day is the party?” he asks. 

“August 26th. Kinda late. But at least Rick Mantle won’t steal it.” Fred looks bemused at Hal’s expression. “Why are you smiling like that?” 

Hal hadn’t realized he was grinning, but his cheeks have begun to hurt.

“Nothing,” he says, shaking his head a little. “That’s the day after I get my braces off.”


	13. Alice, forever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Years from now, when Hal tries to localize specific memories of his childhood, the Middale water park will loom in his mind: damp and towering, alive with the smells of chlorine and sunscreen and sunbaked, blue-painted cement.

Years from now, when Hal tries to localize specific memories of his childhood, the Middale water park will loom in his mind: damp and towering, alive with the smells of chlorine and sunscreen and sunbaked, blue-painted cement. Fred’s birthday party is the hottest and ripest day of the summer, like it had been waiting for him to come along and lay claim to it, and the park is at it’s best and most crowded – lines crisscrossing one another on the dirty pavement, dingy colours made bright by the sun, cars bumper-to-bumper in the parking lot and kids melting in lines longer than an hour for the turbulent, blissful privilege of screaming along a sheet of plastic and being dumped unceremoniously in a warm, man-made lake.  

The colours of the slides and the hand-lettered sign across the entrance are dingy from age, and Hal’s heard his share of stories about diseases incurred from the peach-coloured metal stairs and the Band-Aids scattered here and there along the moist ground. But not even the most stringent of faculty mothers would refuse their children passage at least once a summer to ride the dangerous, sky-high chutes and emerge dripping wet and victorious and alive.   

They are ecstatic. Fred’s party numbers seven boys plus Alice, and Bunny Andrews turns them loose at the gates after a hearty and unanimous promise to look out for one another. Unlike so many things in Hal’s life, the waterpark has not lost its coolness as adolescence wrung out their childhood years– instead, the gritty park limits take on a new veneer of danger and pleasure with their age. There are no bigger kids to push them around in line – they are the big kids now, and the stories whispered in middle school halls – _did you hear about what goes on at the waterpark after hours, under the slides, behind the showers_ – are their own. 

Fred’s glowing with attention, dancing on the hot pavement at the front of their sweaty pack in bright red swim trunks and bare feet. His skin is caramel-brown after a summer outdoors, and Hal makes a mental note to tell him later that his arms and back have grown _some_ noticeable muscle, small as he was. FP is glued to his side like they’re conjoined twins, just as scrawny with his shirt off, grinning almost shyly through his mop of dark hair and sneaking furtive glances around the park in awe, as though he’d never seen something like it before. Hal keeps running his tongue along the front of his teeth, which feel shiny and naked without the wire, tucking it occasionally into the torn flaps of skin behind his lips that might finally now begin to heal.

Fred had twisted around in the front seat on the car ride over and announced to everyone that Hal had just had his braces off, insisting that Hal bare his teeth on display for the approving nods and impressed affirmations of his friends. The sensation of his bare teeth was so distracting that he’d forgotten to worry about his body – he felt uncannily comfortable in his swimsuit and t-shirt, even with other kids pressed against him on either side in the Andrews family Buick. None of them were really built like t-shirt models, after all, and the sweat meant that everyone’s thighs ended up stuck to the seat, no matter what size they were.

Fred had paid loyal attention to Hal up until his mom left them all at the gate, but as was his nature, had gravitated to the front of the group since. Hal didn’t mind it. With FP and Fred leading, the rest of the boys trail them in a jostling, clamouring pack, leaving himself with Alice at the very far back, a few feet behind on the pavement. Back in June he might have felt self-conscious about it, even tried unsuccessfully to insert himself in the bobbing, follow-up crowd, but he recognizes their own insecurity now – that the friends between himself and Fred are groupies jostling for Fred’s attention, which is fixed now and forever firmly on FP, their arms linked like two perfect halves of a duet. 

Alice is smiling, a look that Hal wishes he could capture with a camera and wear out from handling. Her tangled hair is long and loose down her back, and she’s dressed in his inverse: her bare shoulders exposed under her slip of a pale blue tank suit, but her thighs and hips covered by a saggy pair of shorts. Her warm hand sneaks into his somewhere under the shadow of the plummeting orange chute called the _Rattlesnake_ , and doesn’t leave. Hal’s heart pumps, and he has to fight an urge to pull her into him and kiss her. Alice has a thick wad of chewing gum in her mouth, and she keeps cracking it loudly, though Hal’s sure the flavour must have worn out long ago.

They ride the whole rainbow of whirling chutes, even the ones that Hal had always chickened out on before, no matter how many seven-and-eight-year-olds passed him in line. The teenage employees grin wickedly and give them extra-hard shoves, and on more than one partner ride he and Alice have to clutch one another for dear life.

They tire of the slides long before the other kids – Fred’s dispersed group is giddy and frenzied, wet feet slapping the pavement as they doggedly ignore the NO RUNNING signs and sprint for the tallest slides again and again. Alice tugs Hal away from the group, headed away from the amusements with an easy stride, and Hal realizes with a detached surprise that he’d been expecting this all along, and isn’t nervous in the slightest.

For awhile he’s not sure where they’re going – they start heading in the direction of the change rooms but do an about-face halfway there, sneaking instead under the criss-cross of metal beams and distorted, shadowy plastic that holds up the kiddie slides. On the other side of this metal jungle is a string of weedy, disused snack stands – they’re almost past them when Alice abruptly stops and pulls him back, walking him back to a narrow, empty alley painted with a dilapidated mural of colourful sea creatures.

Then they’re squeezed into the passage of the alleyway, damp bodies pressed together, then they’re behind the dripping wall and tucked into a corner that must be behind one of the shower houses, a private square of cement that can only be two or three feet square. She starts kissing him almost immediately, pressing him up against the warm wall with the weight of her body, the skin of her face and lips sun-warmed and smooth. Her tongue slips hot and full into his mouth, her little teeth sharp on his lower lip, but before Hal can kiss her back she pulls away from him, fixing him with a shy, bemused look.   

“What?” Hal asks immediately, worry planting in his stomach like a seed, but Alice only smiles.

“No braces,” she says, and grins. “Cool.”

Then his hands are on her skin, and he’s pulling her in – their mouths slot together like pieces snapped into a jigsaw, the sweeter-than-peach taste of her mouth flooding his senses as she lands against the damp fabric of his t-shirt. Hal tangles a hand in the bottom of her hair, works his fingers through the snarls and ends up cupping her lower back, fingers slipping just slightly below the mesh of her gym shorts. Alice breaks the kiss again, her voice playful but her eyes intense as she speaks against his lower lip.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Hal understands, and for once in his life, doesn’t hesitate. With his fingers trembling only slightly, he reaches down and pulls his clammy t-shirt off over his head, careful not to hit Alice with an elbow in the close quarters. She looks full at him for a long moment, her gaze soft and loving, and then she’s dropping her shorts and stepping out of them, exposing for the first time the bottom half of her swimsuit and the huge, intricate snake tattoo curling over her upper thigh.

Hal’s breath stills, and his first instinct is to put his mouth on it – only Prudence’s years of warning about tetanus keeps him from getting immediately on his knees on the slippery amusement park tile. He lets his fingers slide over it instead, mapping the curve of the serpent with the pads of his fingers – it feels the same as the rest of her skin, maybe softer because of the placement inside her thigh. Hal glances up at her and realizes Alice isn’t done undressing – she’s neatly sliding both straps of her swimsuit down over her shoulders and peeling the swimsuit down to her waist.

Before Hal can move, Alice grips the hand he has on her thigh, pinning his palm to her tattoo. She takes his free hand and moves this one up to her chest, unhesitatingly pressing Hal’s fingers around the shape of her warm breast. Hal must have frozen up, because she leans in again and kisses him, and Hal opens his mouth wide to let her in. The sun on their heads is beating and relentless, her hair hot to the touch, and he thinks faintly of sunburn, and then how hot her skin is, and then she presses closer against him and his hand grips her breast and he doesn’t think about anything at all.

* * *

Almost all of Hal’s young summer memories are here at this park – his hand holding Gertrude’s as she drags him impatiently from line to line, his mother fending off other mothers to claim the best plastic-y lawn chair by the poolside. But most of them are with Fred: one or both of their parents toted along behind as they scampered from ride to ride, little-kid-drunk on the ecstatic joy of throwing themselves close to the jaws of death and escaping.

It had never mattered to them that there was a nicer and brighter waterpark out in Centreville – this one was theirs. When he and Alice emerge from the alleyway in the late afternoon, ducking breathless and clumsy under the maze of weedy metal uprights to reach the main park, Hal feels like the king of it. His legs only shake a little. 

When they reach the spongy blue ground that coats the eating area, Fred’s party has already laid claim to one of the packed tables, a sheet cake adorned with a fizzing sparkler in his mother’s hands. Alice squeezes quick as a flash onto the bench behind Fred’s camp friend Billy Wilkins, and Hal follows suit, the rest of the boys jostling one another to make room for him. 

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU,” they chorus just in time, their voices lost in the din of the park, all of them soaked and sweaty and smiling and too excited about cake to be cool. Fred sits at the head of the table, FP squeezed so close to him that they’re almost in each other's laps, hamming it up for his mother’s camera as a patient Oscar cuts pieces of cake to be handed down the table. Alice adjusts the straps of her swimsuit to cover the lines of her tan, and Hal tugs his shirt self-consciously down in the back. She laughs out loud when one of the plates of cake reaches her place.

“What?” asks Hal, leaning into her so that their knees press, and Alice hands him the plate.  

“Ice cream cake,” she says, and grins like it’s their secret joke, which it is. Hal digs his fork in without hesitating, and even half-melted, it tastes like heaven. Glancing up, Hal meets Fred’s eyes across the table. Fred breaks into a toothy smile – no braces for him, not ever – and Hal tries to commit all of it to memory as best he can – the hot August sun on their heads, the last weeks of freedom before high school, the way Alice felt pressed up against him and the dripping ice cream cake in the middle of it all, Fred’s age stretched out in red gel icing and Fred smiling at him from out of a circle of friends.

It feels like the beginning of everything.

* * *

They drop off almost everyone on their way home, but a select few ride back to the Andrews house, sighing and stretching out in the soggy seats of the Buick now that they have room to stretch their legs. Oscar leaves, Bunny starts tinkering with the front garden, and the remaining kids goof around in Fred’s room for awhile, using the reprieve from parental supervision to devour a bowl of pretzels and watch Fred and FP fight one another on Oscar’s video game system. Finally, Alice has enough and tugs Hal out of the room under the guise of wanting to use the downstairs bathroom. When they reach the first floor, though, she bypasses it entirely and walks down to the basement, her head held high as though the house was her own.

They turn on the stereo, but Hal doesn’t pay attention to what’s playing – something loud with a beat, a rock CD that probably belongs to Fred or Oscar. The Andrews’ keep a futon in the corner of their basement for guests and big sleepovers, and they tumble there without hesitation, Alice kicking her shorts off and dragging a huge floral duvet with her, climbing on top of Hal so that her knees are on either side of his hips and the duvet is covering them both.  

She still smells like the park – chlorine mostly, and their neglected sunscreen - the sour summer smells of his hometown. Her shins are smooth and her fingers clammy, the air conditioning in the basement raising goosebumps along their skin as they undress – clumsily at first, and then with ease. When Hal’s shirt comes off, Alice slides her hands up his belly and chest, skating them around to his sides and under his armpits, locking her palms at last behind his head and kissing him so hard he sees stars. She’d moved his hands to the straps of her swimsuit and pulled it all the way down, and her breasts press naked against his chest now, small and perfect and yet somehow less important than her lips, her mouth, the golden hair that manages to be everywhere at once.  

She travels down his neck, then, all the way to his chest, laying kisses in a straight line so that her hair drags ticklishly down behind her, obscuring her face. When she reaches the hem of his swimsuit she buries her mouth and nose into his lower belly and nips, too gentle to hurt. Her hands find his waistband and Hal reaches down to help her, peels it down to his knees. 

“Kiss me again,” says Hal softly, and she does, climbing over him and kissing him full on the mouth again, her blonde hair hanging down like a curtain around them. He rolls them onto their sides in reply, pressing a hand into the small curve of her back so that she’s pressed flush against him, the tattoo on her bare thigh exposed. Alice moans and moves his hand there and Hal runs his hands over her skin, relishing in the feeling of their closeness, the loss of the last barrier between them.

Alice’s hands are on his back, climbing slowly up the soft flesh to his shoulder blades, and in another life he would have shoved her off on instinct, hating the way her little fingers sank into his flesh, the layers of fat over the muscle. Instead, he relishes it now, her touch and their damp closeness under the duvet, crushed clumsily together, salt on her lips. He kisses and kisses her – explores her top lip and then the bottom one, lays a trail along her jaw up to her cheek, and Alice laughs and scratches his scalp briefly with her nails, fireworks of pleasure bursting behind his closed eyes as her hot mouth presses back into his tongue.

Finally, he ends up above her, her hair spread out below them on the futon like a golden fan. Hal lowers himself onto his forearms to kiss her neck, travelling down the collarbone and chest and stomach, imitating the way she’d kissed his body before. His new swimsuit is down around his ankles and he scratches himself with his toenail as he tries to kick it off, laughing into the gold skin of her hip, and even though Alice doesn’t know what’s funny she laughs too, her hips bucking up into him and pressing the tattoo against his cheek. 

Her swimsuit is still covering her lower half and Hal hesitates with his fingers hooked into the fabric at her waist, his nose pressed to her belly. He’d be happy to just kiss the tattoo on her thigh, frankly, and Alice seems to sense it, rolling her neck to one side to see him better under the secret tent of the duvet.

“You don’t have to-“

Hal meets her eyes, his stomach jumpy. “I want to. I mean, I think I can-“

Alice grins, lazy and teasing, her fingers curling thoughtlessly through his hair. “Then go, tiger,” she urges breathlessly, her eyes dancing with a special look he’s never seen on her before.

Hal’s fingers curl obediently back into the sides of her swimsuit, but he has to stop abruptly when Fred’s voice interrupts them:

“WHAT ARE YOU _DOING!?”_

Alice’s smile goes cold. Hal stays very still, concealed under the duvet, as Alice, grumbling and furious, scrambles her arms back into the straps her swimsuit and sits up. Hal sits up too, at last, wrapping himself entirely in the flowered blanket. 

Fred’s standing there at the entrance to the basement with FP by his side, his arms hooked around his stomach as he dissolves into peals of laughter. FP looks grumpy, but not murderous. Alice, though, has pure danger in her eyes, her face flushing bright pink and her eyes narrowing in fury. “FRED ANDREWS, GET OUT OF HERE!” she bellows, her hair standing on end from the static.  

“It’s my basement!” Fred howls, shaking with laughter. “My futon! Gross!”

Alice throws a pillow at his head as Hal wraps himself tighter in the futon. Fred screams and makes a break for the stairs, his bare feet thumping on the carpeted steps. “WE’RE EVEN NOW!” he yells over his shoulder at Hal as FP follows him up. “GET DRESSED! GET DRESSED! GROSS! ON MY BIRTHDAY!”   

Alice waits until their voices and pounding feet have receded two floors above them before she flops down on her back, the futon creaking in protest as she lets out a groan. She turns incredulously to Hal. “You’re even? What does _that_ mean?” 

“Long story,” replies Hal, admiring how beautiful she looks even flushed and furious, her hair standing on end and her cheeks bright red. She reaches out to his hand and hooks pinkies with him, and for a moment the intimacy of the gesture takes his breath away. Then they’re holding hands entirely, staring at the popcorn ceiling of the Andrews basement, and although she’s his first love, for a long moment Hal never wants to lay next to anyone else in his life.

Finally, Alice groans. “Fred sucks.” She rolls over onto her side, propping herself up on one elbow. “I know it’s his birthday party, but he sucks. Do you want to go to my place and finish this?”

Hal feels himself smile, and for a moment everything in the world feels perfect – himself, his body, his straight teeth, but Alice most of all – the way she draws all the light out of the room just by laying there, her body and face and eyes brighter than any star in the sky.

“Yes,” he answers, sitting up and kissing her so that their noses bump together. “Always yes.”


End file.
